What’s the context?
London is witnessing an aviation capacity crisis. By mid-2020, four of London’s five airports will be at operational capacity, restricted by runway movements or land access. Moreover, as international aviation competition intensifies it is essential that additional UK airport capacity is unlocked.
With the opportunity to utilise its position, Manchester Airports Group (MAG) has embarked on a £600m transformation programme at Stansted Airport (STP), delivering the biggest upgrade to the airport since its construction, unlocking growth for an additional 14 million passengers per year. This includes the construction of a new stand-alone Arrivals terminal, increased Departures and Airfield capacity, and construction of additional car parking.
What’s the challenge?
With a programme of this scale comes significant challenges. Arcadis have worked collaboratively with MAG to help overcome these challenges and deliver additional value to its business, shareholders and customers. Some of the challenges included:
- Delivering a programme in time and on budget
- Delivering commercial and programme efficiencies in the procurement process
- Reducing high levels of operational and business risk and using commercial and procurement
- The need for wider business transformation and people change to deliver increased capacity
- Ensuring planning permission to get an extension in the first place!
- Being resilient to difficult political, regulatory and economic uncertainties e.g. Brexit
- Making the most of redundant capacity in inefficient ‘as-is’ processes
- Having the skills, capacity and asset knowledge to achieve all the above
How have we delivered commercial excellence?
Arcadis focussed on three areas which enabled them to support MAG in becoming a more efficient, customer-focussed and resilient organisation. These included:
Organisation and Benefits Management
Arcadis combined built asset knowledge with business knowledge to develop a new reporting structure and organisational model for STP. Furthermore, with STP under added scrutiny to deliver, key decision makers were looking to generate value beyond the direct financial benefits, while also reducing costs.
To this end, Arcadis delivered an integrated benefits management approach, consisting of benefits mapping and profiling as well as an initial structure of a benefits tracking tool. This was coupled with the change management required to influence a wider view of value.
Procurement and Contracts
After initial advice around specific supplier issues, Arcadis developed a procurement and contracts strategy for the programme, implemented this strategy to deliver specific benefits, and embedded long lasting change and continual improvement approach within the procurement function of the programme through guidance, templates, and a handbook.
Through the strategy, Arcadis were able to ensure an agile, iterative and streamlined process under which packages were consistently delivered under budget e.g. an Airfield package was delivered £8m under budget and a design partner package £6m under budget.
Analytics
Arcadis have also delivered data led analysis and modelling, identified capacity requirements, underwent strategic reviews, informed design and process implications and developed tools to automate previously tedious airport processes.
Through this, Arcadis have identified cost and space efficiencies, and improved customer experience across the asset.