East of England market report

East of England builders must be the shyest on the planet. Of the dozen or so CJ contacted, only a few were willing to talk and two of them turned out to be muscling in from outside the region.

So what makes them so reluctant? Workload projections for the area in the short-term compiled by the Federation of Master Builders don't look so rosy so they can't all be too busy to talk.

Finally, Bernard Clarke, managing director of ISG Jackson's Ipswich office, comes through. He has been working for the firm for 33 years and defends the area's reputation. "We don't all have webbed feet and marry our cousins," he says.

His firm is enjoying a boom since the company split into divisions 18 months ago because it was feared the board was getting too remote from its client base. "This way we empower people and give them personal relationships with clients," he says. Each sector now specialises and understands the clincher information that clients need, such as costs in use, capital and running costs. The approach has paid off with the most recent turnover approaching £100m and the Ipswich office registering its best-ever orderbook of £110m. What's more, clients are happy. Around 70% of their work is repeat business.

Jackson's office employs around 210 staff, including design management teams, to look at value engineering, and electrical and mechanical teams. It uses a number of long-established supply chains. "We know our patch and our clients, and have extended into other regions. We are a management team organisation and rely on key suppliers to partner with us. Some of them have been with us for 20 years," he says.

Frameworks

Currently, the office is running seven residential and social housing frameworks with clients including Hanover Housing and Swan, giving them transparency of work for three to four years. It has been shortlisted for three framework contracts in the education sector, schools in Cambridge, Essex and Milton Keynes. It also does commercial work and smaller special projects.

Clarke believes the company's success is partly due to the way it manages its tendering activities. "The biggest cost is tendering and we are very selective about which tenders we put through." His three business development staff use a checklist: define the project; when is it likely to go out to tender; has the client acquired the site; have they got final planning permission; are there reserved matters; and have they secured an end user.

Depending on the answers, the team knows how many resources need to be allocated. If the client merely wants a feasibility study, they will do it, but in a less resource-rich way. If it is a genuine opportunity, they will tender. Their aim is to put a team together and work side by side with a client, not least to ensure buildability. Currently, their success rate in bidding rounds is one in three-and-a-half, significantly higher than the industry average.

Although Jackson doesn't employ its own craftsmen, it invests in its staff using an in-house training academy that has been running for 20 years and trains all its technical staff. Supply chain members are also encouraged to attend the academy in addition to in-house staff, who can look forward to three tiers of training: graduates still deciding on where they want to specialise; mid-range managers looking for promotion; and divisional director prospects.

Most of the graduates have construction-related degrees to which the academy can add soft-skills training alongside six-month stints in project management, surveying etc to help them choose what they want to do. The company is also keen to recruit ex-army people - they have a lot of common sense, says Clarke. Staff turnover is low, with a churn rate of 12% overall, and 9% in technical staff.

The future

Looking ahead, prospects are good, with a year's visibility across the company and key performance indicators in place in business development to help monitor progress. They are also looking to extend south into Kent to pick up work. Clarke also sees a gap in the market opening up as the big boys of the industry pick up Thames Gateway and Olympics contracts. "They will suck in major contractors and leave opportunities for others in their wake," he says. Company strategy is to go for contracts up to £15m, but not to join others' supply chains. "We are not good at being the meat in the sandwich," he says ruefully.

He sees the next 10 to 15 years in East Anglia as being prolific, but it has its downside. Materials availability needs watching. Steelwork lead-in times are currently up to 12 weeks and more in some cases, so clients need to be encouraged to make early decisions on construction. Spin-off work on ports is likely: Jackson has just finished an office block in Felixstowe for a Chinese client who is committed to work in the port. But the biggest headache is likely to be manpower. "We will all be competing for the same labour," he warns. It is likely to trigger upward pressure on salaries. "The days of saying we will have 12-month salary reviews for staff are long gone. One of the biggest problems is the agencies that come back after six months and offer our staff new deals." Clearly recruitment is much easier than retention.

Headaches of a different type are the daily order for Martin Potterton, Bovis Lend Lease's project director for the Grand Arcade in Cambridge city centre. It has been working since January 2005 on the scheme, which is due for completion next March. The client is Grand Arcade Partnership (GAP), a joint venture of Grosvenor Developments and the Universities Superannuation Scheme, each of which Bovis has worked with previously. Grand Arcade's overall development cost is £250m with construction taking £95m.

It's a unique project in a historic and cramped city centre full of students and tourists all year round. The site is very tight and Bovis is building right up to the project limit lines so there is no space for storage. Hence a just-in-time approach. There is a marshalling yard two miles from the city where lorries wait to be summoned when needed in a very tight traffic management system controlled by marshals. Not every delivery driver has been co-operative, Potterton says. But it only takes one refusal to accept delivery, for them to learn that time slots are rigid and will be enforced.

Constant communication

Bovis has held a lot of meetings with the City Council over the past three years along with daily conversations to keep the scheme rolling smoothly. Deliveries to the neighbouring shopping centre have also become Potterton's responsibility as Bovis controls the only access road on to its joint site, which operates round the clock.

Potterton believes the scheme has run smoothly because Bovis has invested a lot of time in liaison, employing a full-time liaison manager and 24/7 manned telephone contact. He also sees it as a likely model for the future. "This is the way things are going, as we use more brownfield sites. Best practice with third parties is becoming the norm. You have to think outside the box, about what it feels like to have this done in your own back garden. It is all about communication."

Bovis's close neighbours include a four-storey hotel, the shopping centre, a British Telecom exchange and four historic colleges. They were particularly sensitive about how noise and vibration would be managed. Not easy when you have to take down three reinforced concrete structures, one of six and one of five storeys, drive piles with seven tower cranes and have no room to swing a cat. And it was all taking place over three university exam periods. So the company signed up to a "pretty stringent" noise and vibration control agreement.

At the same time Bovis relocated the local department store, Robert Sale (part of John Lewis) into a temporary store a mile away and will move it back to a store four times its size.

Oh, and then there's the archaeology. The site has had a complete dig of every square inch in the 12 months following demolition, when the archaeologists were working alongside, but separate to, the bulk excavation and piling rigs. Bovis set up a public archaeology weekend when 2,500 people came along and the site was dotted with tents. They found a lot of Anglo-Saxon stuff including the King's Ditch, the walls of a fortress around the old city.

"Every project now has a level of archaeology on it - gone are the days when you could just dig a hole in the ground. So we worked with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, which got us some early local interest and it helped involve the public."

Not everything has gone according to plan. Potterton admits problems with the archaeological dig in the car park meant they had to increase the number of tower cranes to seven, re-sequence and work more hours. The cranes are able to reach all parts of the site by over-sailing to keep the materials flowing. Bovis used anti-clash software and a full-time crane co-ordinator to ensure everything went smoothly.

The likely pay-off of all this planning is that the company will be invited back to Cambridge to do more, or to work on similar sites elsewhere, and this will surely help its drive to win its third considerate contractor gold award on the trot...