ProCon Partners on route for bumper year with a share of £2.4 billion Highways England contracts
ProCon Partners, the leading project controls consultancy, has won a series of projects with Highways England to ensure the smooth delivery of smart motorway installations across England. The five projects, which have a combined overall value of £2.4billion, will cover the M4, M1, M6, M20, M23, A14 and A21.
ProCon will deploy their unique Live Reporting and Analytics Service to give real-time feedback on the progress of each project, enabling Highways England to improve traffic flow for the 100,000s of drivers who use the roads every day.
Nick Gaunt, Managing Director of ProCon, commented: “Our project controls consultants will be working closely with the construction and planning teams to help Highways England deliver each of these important road upgrades as smoothly as possible.”
Highways England face a tough challenge with each road upgrade project, in finding the balance between maximising motorway capacity while maintaining safety on motorways, whilst achieving the minimum amount of disruption to road users and the businesses and residents in the surrounding areas during the works.
Nick Continues: “Managing this kind of tight tolerance is where our suite of tools really comes in to its own, providing unsurpassable reporting and guidance to enable swift and intelligent decision making to cope with any challenge as it happens, keeping projects on schedule and on budget. This really is a smart solution to installing Smart Motorways.”
By bringing together the three disciplines of cost, commercial and schedule, ProCon will enable all the project stakeholders to understand where each project is heading and what issues need addressing as they occur. ProCon’s experience in working with highways projects also means that its predictive analytics can help to identify potential problems before they arrive. The Data Visualisation suite, which will be part of the project management system supplied by ProCon, generates user-friendly reports, tailored to the needs of project members, showing exactly what is happening in real-time.
This detailed and accurate level of monitoring and reporting enables follow through decisions to have the intended impact. Over the course of the projects, the ProCon team will also capture and share ‘lessons learned’, which will enable Highways England to improve both cost and delivery efficiencies in future implementations.
The upgrades will see improvements made to almost 100 miles of the most congested stretches of road in England. Data gathered by Highways England since the opening of the first Smart Motorway in 2006, shows that making these changes to our roads will improve journey reliability improved by 22%, cut the risk of personal injury by more than half. Where accidents do occur, severity is much lower overall. In the 11 years since the M42 upgrade, there have been zero fatalities.
Nick concludes: “We are delighted to play our part in helping to make sure these massive projects are delivered smoothly and with minimum disruption. Winning this series of projects is a fantastic vote of confidence in our solutions and is an indication that we are heading in the right direction.”
