Open-book pays off at Bentley

JN Bentley's turnover is on track to hit £50m this year - a 150% increase over the past two years. The Yorkshire-based contractor's transformation stems from its breakthrough in working with major clients that want to work on an open-book basis.

In 2001, Bentley made a pre-tax profit of £1m on a turnover of £20m, and its 2002 results are expected to show profit doubling to more than £2m on a turnover of £34m.

The breakthrough came from Yorkshire Water's award of one of its four framework agreements, which cover the five years to 2005, to a joint venture between Bentley and Mott Macdonald.

All of Yorkshire Water's other awards went to national contractors.

Bentley engineering director John Cain said: "We're unusual in that we are a relatively small regional contractor, based in Skipton, but we're keeping company with national players.

"We wanted to work with clients looking to open-book forms of contract, so we designed a bespoke software package with Italik called CMS (Construction Management System). It's our IT costing system.

"A lot of our work is cost-plus, which would traditionally call for an army of quantity surveyors. We don't have any such army and neither do we have lots of back-up paperwork. CMS saves the cost of about five surveyors a year, so on the £20m job [with Yorkshire Water] there is the potential for a £250,000 saving. It meant that we paid for the software in a year," said Cain.

"We've taken CMS to other clients, emphasising the degree of openness that is possible, and we've won multi-million pound contracts in several sectors: commercial building; waste water; and airports. Bentley's turnover should rise by a third as some of these are in the bag and others are close. It has given us big company processes but with a regional contractor's nimbleness," he added.