Time for an office refurb! But who do you call? Surely there exists the perfect Design and Build contractor for you out there in London town, but you need to choose them yourself.
Wait, what’s that about Design and Build?
What does Design and Build mean anyway?
Design and Build (D&B) is a modern, effective method of procuring your office interiors project where your cost and programme risk is managed much more effectively.
More effectively than what, you ask? Well, to answer that, we need to talk about Traditional procurement. So get your pipe and slippers out, because we’re going old school.
With Traditional procurement, you do all the legwork on your project:
- Choose a project manager (or nominate someone in your company with too much time on their hands)
- Get your architect or design consultancy in
- And the interior designer
- And cost consultant (watch those margins! After all, you’ll be setting the budgets)
- And mechanical and electrical people
- And an IT guy
- And after a bidding war, a contractor (who’s won it on the lowest bid, because that’s a sure sign of quality)
- And in the meantime, enrol in a plate spinning class, because you’re going to need it
Compare this to procuring an office interior project that uses a D&B contract:
- Hire one company to do everything for you
Boom! Sorted.
Why is Design and Build Better?
You need more info? Alright, but D&B actually is that simple. This method of procurement just involves getting one company in to do the design, management and construction of your office refurb under a single contract.
No plates to spin, no long list of companies to yell at, just one point of contact. They will manage the risk, tell it to you straight, and give you confidence that your IT guy isn’t going to fall out with your brickie because he’s put a wall right through the server room after reading the plans wrong.
Yeah. Now you can see why that other procurement method is called Traditional. If you go that way, you might as well put a big sticker on your reception desk saying, “we do what’s always been done because we don’t like new things. Also we’re going bankrupt from programme overrun.”
Fixed price and fixed timeline
What’s that about programme overrun? No need to worry about that. With D&B, your chosen contractor manages all your risk, so right at the design stage you’ll be given a fixed price and a fixed timeline for completion. Plus, with them sorting out every bit of the job, they’ll be able to advise where you can save money. D&B is really that good.
Compare that to Traditional, where the construction cost won’t be known until much later. This has broken many a heart set on a tunnel slide from the board room to the reception.
As there’s one company, they can get their people to carry out tasks concurrently. Absolutely need that tunnel slide? Here’s a great one that we’ve already costed up, and it will take this long to arrive in London and get installed, so we’d better order it now.
And that’s how we’ve just saved you four weeks of programme that would have been spent waiting around with a giant hole in the floor for interns to fall down. Jobs a goodun!
So does that have you convinced? Great! That’s your procurement method sorted then. Now it’s time to get a brilliant Design and Build contractor on board who can take all that risk off your shoulders. We’ve even written a white paper about it. Give us a call and we can take you through it.
