The New Breed of Agile Tier 1 Contractors in Construction, Civil Engineering and Utilities Infrastructure.

These highly challenging times have spawned a new breed of highly agile, dynamic and innovative Tier 1 specialist Contractor, operating in Construction, Civil Engineering and Utilities Infrastructure Sectors.

These business have highly skilled and experienced industry proven personnel, and operate highly efficient Commercial and Back Office Departments, delivering a level of professionalism and commerciality, with high levels of Procurement, Supply Chain management and Contract Manager expertise within their midst.

The highly lean model, often means they provide all the prerequisite skills and competencies to operate at Tier 1 level scope into their Clientele, but with efficiencies of operational model and size, that bring with them costs savings for the engaging Clients, over and above those costs normally experienced and incurred when dealing with the big name large Main Contractors. Those at the very vanguard of this change, are themselves, highly innovative organisations, constantly seeking further efficiency, continuous improvement and betterment.

An example of such a beast is the multi-award-winning South Wales based Tier 1 Contractor, K M Plant Hire & Groundworks Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of the K M Group. As a well established and highly respected business, K M Plant Hire & Groundworks is well known for its operational parallels with much larger concerns, and has earned its stripes (along with some notable awards for excellence and innovation) in the Construction, Civil Engineering and Utilities Infrastructure Sector. Known for delivering big name Main Contractor levels of professionalism, commerciality and operational efficiency, at a lower cost than the big names, by virtue of a lean, efficient and dynamic structure, free from many of the costly overheads associated with the much larger sector players.

K M Plant provides services into many of the major utilities and provides a near seamless interface in the sub-contracted function and a turn-key ready-to-go solution. Many of these arrangements commenced as Tier 2 engagements through major Contractors such as Kier, Amey, Enterprise and their ilk, and led to direct engagements with many more prestigious leading industry names, when their competency and capabilities became more widely known and recognised.

Such agility and value, often just simply cannot be delivered by the industry behemoths through sheer size and weight of process, departmental and operational drag. K M Plant and its peers, are now providing that refreshing value and responsiveness that Clients are actively seeking in such economically challenging times. This is turn facilitates greater affordability and simplicity of supply chain for the engaging parties, something the big name Main Contractors have cleverly utilised in a Tier 2 capacity, and benefitted from this strategic advantage.

Current economic conditions have provided the perfect environment for these small but perfectly formed specialist Tier 1 level Contractors, to prove their exceptional value against big name alternatives. This is in effect, evolutionary development, playing out in the Built Environment world.

These smaller highly agile businesses, also have a greater understanding and empathy with very small contractor businesses, and allow them to provide their valuable services, facilitated and guided by more experienced and knowledgeable professionals.

Credit: K M Plant Hire & Groundworks Ltd provide their services into Water, Electricity, Telecommunications, Oil and Gas and Highways Clients, predominantly across Wales, the South West of England, the Midlands and Greater London.

www.KM-Group.co.uk