Carillion National Building is part of Carillion’s Construction to Services Group, and has strong regional representations. Its portfolio of projects stretches from under £1 million to over £300 million on projects like the New Accommodation Project at GCHQ in Cheltenham. Other customers include Wm Morrison Supermarkets Plc, Asda, Argent Group Plc, The Unite Group Plc, Modus Properties Ltd and Countryside Properties Plc.

Carillion National Building is a UK market leader in commercial building, focused primarily on the residential, retail, office, health, education, and defence & secure sectors. It delivers through a variety of procurement routes including traditional contracting, design & build, and PFI / PPP. A commitment to Health & Safety, Quality and Sustainable Construction has been rewarded through a string of accolades, including winning the Contract Journal Building Contractor of the Year Award in 2004 and the Sustainability Awards Sustainable Contractor of the Year Award in 2005.

In 2002, Carillion National Building moved from their previous estimating system with its slow batch processes, to CIT. Chris Roddie, Head of Programme Management, for Carillion, says “The estimating market was changing to become more sub-contractor based and we wanted something modern to replace our old-fashioned software. We needed something strong to compare subcontractor prices like-for-like.”

Carillion looked at several systems including Causeway, Conquest and CCS Estimating. “Our Estimators created a set of ranked requirements and then scored each of the software solutions against these – Tekton’s CIT scored the highest and particularly high-scoring were CIT’s subcontractor comparison routines.”

Tekton’s CIT scored the highest and particularly highscoring
were CIT’s subcontractor routines.

He continues, “We were also very happy with the technology on which Tekton’s CIT is based and the development path that was offered. We were even able to work with Tekton’s CIT team to enhance parts of the software not only for us but for future clients. Incorporating ideas from users of the software is an important aspect of research and development as far as we’re concerned.”

A few years after CIT’s successful implementation across the UK, Carillion also had some bespoke work done to their prelims, to their historical archive database and to their reporting. “It’s great that we can make the system work ‘our’ way and CIT has definitely lived up to everyone’s expectations” enthuses Chris Roddie. “What’s more, Tekton’s support is first-class – if a user’s got a problem with a database for example, Tekton will offer to receive it by email and actually look at it rather than try to resolve it over the phone. This hands-on support is invaluable.”

Carillion’s future plans for CIT include assessing the Post-Contract Valuations module to compliment the estimating and cost planning functionality.