About the same as if you did
it yourself! Employ a person with our qualifications
and experience. Provide, PA support, computer and
printing/plotting equipment, a share of the office
overheads and insurance. That annual cost divided
by working days/hours available in a year equals our
hourly/daily charge.
Fees as a percentage of the total
expenditure vary according to the time we are required
to spend on the project. Generally however, the larger
the project the smaller becomes that percentage becomes.
However, this does not apply to survey and report
work.
The advantage of appointing CCS, other than the expertise
and professionalism, is that whilst the service is
always on hand, it is only paid for when used.
The exercise is open-book and is independent from
any manufacturer supplier or contractor. Value for
money and performance are the criteria.
We do not carry the overhead of a sales force or the
production of competitive tendering – because
we do not engage in either.
We are not Package Deal contractors.
We do not hide the costs of the subcontractors and
add percentages to them – to cover the overhead
of speculative tendering. We provide an open-book
exercise.
The term “Consultant” relates to the services
we offer and not an excuse to apply a standard percentage
to the contract sum to arrive at our charges. We only
charge for our time and expenses. The contract sum
value is irrelevant to the amount we charge.
We offer time and expense charges in a manner that
an ACE (Association of Consulting Engineers) professional
consultant would apply them using their terms as a
guideline.
If the politics are such that a percentage or fixed
sum is required to be shown in the Cap Ex application,
we just convert our estimate of the time and expenses
we anticipate, into that figure.
All expenditure, nevertheless, is backed up with the
production of monthly log sheets.
We commence all projects by deciding on a specification
for the works required. Without determining this,
how is anyone going to produce a design and price?
The alternative is to leave it to
the package dealers or contractors to sort out. Which
is fine, but will produce different solutions for
different equipment for different prices – so
who decides which is correct/best value for money/includes
all necessary items?
If one appears to be offering the best solution –
do you then have to offer this to the others who were
quoting and ask them to price again?
At the end of all this, who carries the responsibility
for any items they have all missed out? For example,
the air conditioning contractor is unlikely to include
for any Landlord licensing – or think of it.
The package dealer will always include the exclusion
clause that absolves them from everything they have
forgotten.
Let’s look at the tendering exercise
for a moment:
A client invites, say three package dealers, to quote
for a telecommunications/server room installation.
Each package dealer goes out to, say, three:
Partitioning, electrical, comms cabling, air conditioning,
fire detection and security companies – less
one of those because most package dealers are actually
one of those themselves.
Clearly only one package dealer will be successful.
That means that of the 48 contractors, including the
package dealers, (who will be nominating themselves
for one of the elements), only six will be awarded
work!
That, on the basis of no common specification –
and so some may have to quote again – based
on what – a consensus?
What an absolute waste of everyone's time! Someone
must pick up the cost of those unsuccessful quotations.
You will find it in the overhead element of the contractors
– so a client somewhere pays.
In terms of time-involvement by client, contractors
and ourselves? – Yes.
In terms of contractors prices? – Not always! We are looking at value for money. That
means the right quality of materials for the job,
the right corporate management that reflects on the
quality of the workforce and the right experience,
in what are specialist environments.
It is easy to get a cheap price – Yellow pages
and invite the largest adverts to quote – and
then start a Dutch auction. The inevitable repayment
of the money saved is a well-worn story.
Admittedly, there are material or equipment only supplies
to which the cheapest rule might apply, but CCS control
the specification to ensure like for like performance
compatibility.
The histogram below assumes that the contractors'
works included in a project to have a net cost content
of £100k and no large single cost items of equipment.
The Package Dealer marks up the contractors’
prices to cover his overheads – which include
sales and speculative tendering, and achieves a price
of circa: £126k.
This is in competition with others, and the question
is how the best technical content and value for money
has been assessed and by whom? What happens if one
dealer offers the best air conditioning and another
the best electrical services?
The IT supplier has added their standard
mark-up to the package dealer’s price, and achieves
a price of circa: £175k.
The mark-up is just the standard they apply to the
equipment they market and is simply a political requirement
that their entire turnover contains this margin.
CCS produces the same deal for circa:
£ 116k.
The above illustrates the competitiveness
of the CCS service. However, when large capital items
of equipment are involved in the project, this competitiveness
increases, as the design and management element is
small related to that expenditure.
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