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They’ve got the whole world!

Construction
The global engineering consultancy responsible for the structural designs of the Shard in London (the tallest building in the Europe), as well as three new towers of the World Trade Center in New York including 1 World Trade Center (the tallest building in the USA), is looking for new areas to operate in. Tom Smith, the global director of property and buildings at WSP Global, spoke to us while visiting the firm’s Warsaw office about the expansion of the company’s operations

Rafał Ostrowski, ‘Eurobuild CEE’: Your firm generates CAD 4.5 bln (EUR 3 bln) in revenue per year. It is large global company with modest presence in the CEE region. Do you have plans to increase that?

Tom Smith, WSP: Yes, we have an ambition to increase our presence in the CEE region and in particular Poland. It is very much a part of our European strategy. We have 3,100 staff in Scandinavia, 5,000 in the UK, but in mainland Europe we have only approximately 560 people: 300 in Germany, 150 in France, 80 in Poland and 30 in Romania. If you combine all these offices our presence in mainland Europe is still sub-scale compared to what we have, for example, in the UK or Sweden.

Does this involve opening new offices?

If we have a certain number of projects in a particular city, this might act as a catalyst to open offices there. But there is also the question of the economies of scale, because sometimes I am not sure how would it work if we opened five or six offices in Poland instead of having all the skills in one location. Much of this is driven by the clients. If we had a client with a project in Wrocław or Kraków, we would respond accordingly, but I think with technology and the increased mobility of people you don’t require as many offices as you used to. I believe we can certainly expand our Warsaw office considerably. The question is how do we expand our services to use this office as a base to do more work in Central and Eastern Europe, including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia? Today we had a meeting with some potential partners who have been working in the Middle East and with WSP’s strong presence in that region it made me think, why can’t our Polish business support our local partners with their projects in Dubai, Riyadh and Doha?? Hence, the opportunity to grow the business is clearly there. Now we have to do it carefully and see the wider picture; what is fundamental is the quality of the service, attracting the right people with the right technical and client skills, so it is going to take time.

Your company has seen some big mergers in the last few years. In 2012 WSP merged with Genivar and in 2014 it merged with Parsons Brinckerhoff. What has this really changed and where are these mergers taking you?

We have seen increasing consolidation in consultancy services for engineering and project management, so bigger firms are becoming bigger and more global and those firms that don’t consolidate are going to struggle. Our global strategy and mindset is not a vanity thing, but a response to a number of current trends. For instance, many of our clients are global. For Volvo we have designed factories in Sweden and China; for a global developer like US-based Hines, we are supporting their investment in the USA, France, Poland, Germany and China. There are many of our clients who come up to us and say: “How can you help us achieve our global ambitions?”

So you are consolidating to hold onto your global clients?

Yes, but not only that. The other issue is our staff coming to work with WSP and they want the opportunity to work on global projects and many of them are the best projects in the world. If we don’t provide these kinds of opportunities for our staff then we are not going to retain them, let alone attract them. If you ask me what our main competitive advantage is, it is our people and offering opportunities to work on the best projects in the world as well as overseas experiences, is a great differentiator in retaining and attracting the very best talent.

This is good for your clients and for your staff. Is there anything else?

I think many of the projects we are working on are becoming bigger and more complex and it is quite difficult for one particular region or country to actually provide all of the skills necessary. So there are a number of projects that we are working on at the moment where the skills are coming from different parts of the WSP world to deliver that project. The merger with Genivar, which is very much a Canadian business, gave us 5,000 people in Canada and 1,000 in South America. We had no presence in either of these regions before. The merger with Parsons Brinckerhoff gave us 6,000 people in the US, 3,000 in the EMEA region and 5,000 people in APAC, but the main point was that Parsons Brinckerhoff is very well known for infrastructure, the biggest rail projects, airport projects, and some of the biggest and complex tunnel and bridge projects in the world. WSP, on the other hand, was very much seen as a buildings business, albeit with an impressive portfolio of infrastructure projects. I don’t believe any other firm in the world has the ability to be number one in buildings and also number one in infrastructure.

So how do these mergers affect one of your 500 offices worldwide, namely, the one located in Warsaw?

It doesn’t affect it that much, because we are very much driven by having strong regional offices and Poland is a strong business and is very successful, but what it is now able to offer is access to WSP’s richness of 32,000 engineers, project managers, environmental experts and specialists. So when I meet staff in our Warsaw office I say to them, “each one of you is a portal to all our experts worldwide”. All of our clients can now get access to a security expert or a specialist in geometric complex modelling. We might not have these people sitting in the Warsaw office but we have those people within the WSP family and when there is the need to access this skill and bring that expertise into the office. As I said, the whole reason for being the size we are is not a case of vanity; it is about being able to say to our clients that we can help you find a solution to whatever problem you have.

What is your strategic plan for further development?

Part of our strategy is always to be the best consultant in each city we are based. So if you go to London, we are the top buildings engineer there, if you go to New York, it is the same, if you go to Hong Kong, we are the top MEP engineer. We see the opportunity to be number one in all our building engineering disciplines. If we apply that policy to Poland, where we have a very strong MEP engineering and environmental business in Warsaw, probably number one in the market here, then we also want to do that for structural engineering and we want to do that for energy and BIM modelling.

Engineers are similar to architects in the respect that they don’t sell any products, but rather their knowledge, concepts and designs. Yet they seem to work very much in the shadow of the architects, who become famous when their projects become recognisable. How important is the role of engineers in modern construction?

An architect is very much responsible for two elements that have to be designed – the first entails the function of the building and the second is the form, how the building looks – its aesthetics. The architect requires an engineer to make sure that the architect’s ideas can be built, and then there is also the need for building services engineering design, for example, the air-conditioning, fire detection systems and technology requirements. What we are seeing is that a lot of recommendations are coming from many different architects, be they local, global, signature or specialist. We enjoy working with world famous star architects who challenge the way you think about buildings, such as Foster and Partners, Renzo Piano, Herzog de Meuron, to name just a few. There is a creativity level that has to be proven from the calculation point of view. Nowadays architects and engineers work much more collaboratively to find the best solutions.

So what actually is the cost of engineering compared, for example, to the cost of the architectural design?

When it comes to fees the rule of thumb is that the architecture is half the total design fee and the engineering is the other half. But this also depends very much on the type of building. If there is more engineering content in the building, the architect would get much more involved in the aesthetics, the form. I think much of this depends on the complexity of the building. For example, a hospital is a very complex building in terms of the mechanical and electrical engineering. It requires a lot of ventilation, air-conditioning for the operations, clean rooms, rooms for medical gases and the like – so the contribution to the hospital building from the mechanical and electrical engineering consultant will be even more than the effort that goes into the structural engineering.

How do you see the future of construction?

First of all, buildings are becoming more intelligent. For example, façades that automatically respond to the environment, due to the use of photo-sensitive materials. Smart glass will also be fitted, automatically shading the interiors when it is too sunny outside, but illuminating them with as much daylight as possible when they can. As you walk into a building, CCTV cameras will soon be able to recognise who you are and know that you work on floor 70 and will tell you to go to lift ‘A’ because that goes straight to floor 70. And when you arrive at your work station and you touch your mouse it will be able to measure your heart rate and your metabolic rate – and it might say you are tired and to wake you up a little it could inject more ventilation into your immediate work space. Designing all of this is mostly about the technology and the use of materials – and it is vital that WSP is at the forefront of new technology and intelligent buildings.

And what about the construction process?

I can see construction becoming more like manufacturing. The components of buildings, whether we are talking about air-conditioning components or sections of the façade, will be prefabricated and brought to the site for assembly. Too much of our work in construction is actually done by people on site in poor weather, which is not very productive and increases the health and safety risk. I think this will change in the same way we now design and build aeroplanes or cars in a factory. I can see buildings being designed like that. You design, then you manufacture, and then you bring all the components to the site to assemble in a BIM environment. Digital engineering will change the construction industry.

And this takes less time?

If you build things in a factory, the quality is always going to be better and when applied to a construction site. The process becomes more efficient and productive so it will take less time. Most importantly, you are always going to make it safer. A great example is the spire of the Shard, which is 60m high and was actually built offsite close to a motorway well outside of London. With the contractor we built it, put together every single component, and then the architect and ourselves checked every weld connection, made sure that it was safe, worked out the biggest part we could put on the back of a lorry to bring it to London and the heaviest weight to put into a crane to lift. Then we dismantled it, laid out all the parts and installed it that way at the site. And this allowed us to reduce the number of lifts, it reduced the number of people working at heights of around 300m, and we knew that the quality was going to be perfect because it had already been built previously. So why not start applying this approach to different parts of the buildings.

So more intelligent, prefabricated… and what else?

The third main change will be the adoption of e-design to come up with even more unique structures, even more varied geometric shapes – and this will allow architects to come up with ever more outlandish ideas. Using e-design you can see more and visualise more.

Do you feel that the importance of engineering design is increasing over time?

Definitely! The world’s population has now reached 7 bln and it will be 10 bln by 2050. What is this going to mean for housing, hospitals and schools? Engineers and architects are going to be needed to build all of that. About 60 pct of the world’s population live in cities and by 2050 the figure will be as much as 80 pct. So what do we do? Do we expand cities or will we contain the urban sprawl and build upwards? And in order to have a free market, in which I am a great believer, there needs to be the free movement of goods people and money. How do you move people around? You need infrastructure to get to different parts of the country and the wider world. So engineers are going to be needed for this and in this way they will be influencing mobility. So I can only see a very exciting time ahead of us and we will be right in the centre of it. ν

Road to the top

WSP was founded as the William Sale Partnership in the UK in 1969 and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1987. In 2012 it was taken over by Canadian engineering firm Genivar, which at the beginning of last year created a parent company for the group, WSP Global, which is based in Montréal. Tom Smith joined WSP in 1994 and since then has held a number of senior business leadership positions in the UK, Middle East and India regions. Since 2010 he has focused on the company’s global agenda and has been instrumental in developing WSP’s global culture, connectivity and services. In 2013 he joined the company’s executive team, and in January 2014 was appointed global director of property and buildings.

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