IWS M&E – winners in the 2019 Northumbrian Water GEM awards
Integrated Water Services (IWS) has been awarded the ‘One Team’ award at this year’s prestigious Northumbrian Water Ltd (NWL) GEM Awards.
This year’s awards were held in Newcastle on 16th September. The event is attended by numerous consultants and specialist contractors in the water sector and is themed “Going the Extra Mile”. The awards night recognises projects and teams that have achieved excellence and exceeded expectations, to help Northumbrian Water achieve resilient and sustainable water and wastewater services.
The nominated project for the ‘One Team’ award was the Syleham water treatment works capacity upgrade, located in Suffolk. The brief was to create a
brand new water treatment facility within a 14 month programme that included procurement of land
by the NWL team, site investigations, design and construction management by IWS, plus support from Claret Civil Engineering as sub-contractor.
With IWS as principal contractor, designer and the mechanical and electrical specialist, the combined team of IWS, NWL and Claret has achieved exceptional results having only commenced work on site in April 2019. Enhanced levels of collaboration were adopted for the project with IWS hosting design sprints to engage key stakeholders and experts from all teams. Early engagement of these stakeholders ensured the programme could run with multiple parallel activities, technical solutions were agreed early, and the environmental and safety plans were aligned across the team.
The IWS design team used innovative 3D modelling in design sprints which enabled interactive planning and programme coordination of the construction activities to be visualised in an early conceptual model. As a result, potential hazards and activity risks during construction were identified, adjusted and mitigated. The sprints were used by IWS to launch their ‘Digital Delivery’ strategy which includes BIM (Building Information Modelling).
Working as a team, IWS, NWL and Claret Civil Engineering achieved excellent results and met extremely tight deadlines, displaying values and behaviours that trusted collaborative partnerships are founded upon. On the night the ‘One Team’ award was accepted by all members of the team.
