About Us

Mission Statement

To provide innovation, knowledge sharing, risk assessment and facilitation services to individual organisations and to the UK construction sector as a whole to enhance the ability to deliver customer delight to the benefit of society.

John Findlay Personal Statement

Download Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Current focus is on innovation, knowledge sharing and business management systems. John has recently completed a report drawing on interviews from senior executives in organisations on the supply side of the built environment about the attitudes concerning innovation and innovation processes. The work is being taken forward to try to increase the innovation and research intensity within the sector. Through research, exposure and contribution to networks and visits to organisations John has a wealth of understanding of how knowledge sharing can succeed in organisations in the built environment and has facilitated this agenda for Balfour Beatty plc for more than one year.

In March 2009 John assessed 26 proposals for the Technology Strategy Board’s High Value Manufacturing call. The proposals covered a wide number of industrial sectors including the built environment encompassing both technical and process improvements. The ability to undertake this assignment builds on the experience of being a judge for the Quality in Construction Awards for six years, for the Institution of Highways and Transportation Awards for three years and for the EPSRC Peer Review College for more than a decade.

During his time with Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Service he instigated and was project sponsor for their EFQM programme and devised the concept of a holistic business management system to distribute company processes and procedures while enabling the organisation to manage its progress through an integrated suite of performance measures and to ensure compliance with its formal accreditation standards. He participated in the formulation of the business’s strategic policies.

From John’s wealth of experience in geotechnical engineering and the frequent interfaces with other engineering disciplines, he has the broad overview to ensure the health of the engineering discipline within an organisation. John has experience of running contracting and consultancy units with profit and loss accountability. He is fully familiar with the challenges of a devolved organisational structure and has worked to develop the forums to enable learning to flourish through trust and reciprocity, having seen all too often how software solutions fail to deliver.

In 1995 during his time with Stent, John instigated a complete re-engineering of how the organisation regarded and treated its clients long before the approach became recognised in the industry. The blueprint for the integration of electronic data gathering and distribution was devised and worked through resulting in Stent’s current position of being at world leading edge of pile data collection systems engineering. The transformation of Stent from a simple sub-contractor to an engineering led innovative company was overseen from his appointment as Chief Engineer in 1982 to his position as an internal consultant when he retired from the Balfour Beatty Group at the end of 2007.

Within the Balfour Beatty Group starting in 1996 John was a key contributor to the development of the group wide risk framework, which considers safety, quality and commercial risk and opportunities in a consistent manner across the Group. The adoption of a risk framework was regarded as a key step in improving the safety regime within specialist businesses although thinking in recent times is more clearly focussed on behaviour and supporting cultural change. He supported and took part in a European network event in 2003 that showed that it compared favourably with other large construction organisation’s systems.

He instigated and contributed to the development of the first edition of the ICE Specification for Piling and Embedded Walls which has become a de facto national standard. More recently he was the Chairman of the CIRIA Steering Group for the Embedded Walls Research Project, which resulted in a report that has been widely acclaimed for its clarity and wealth of information. He has contributed to many CIRIA publications and has frequently been invited to join their research steering groups. The most recent was on the just completed (April 2009) Whole Life Infrastructure Asset Management; Good Practice Guide for Civil Infrastructure.

John has a consuming interest in development whether through original work or continuous improvement. With BBIS he arranged the commercial and physical support to work with an inventor to revolutionise the way road cones are laid and retrieved in temporary road works including the automated laying of tapers. Other sector breaking innovations were championed during his time in managing and maintaining road networks. In the mid-90s Stent developed the first use of on-the-fly initiation, high resolution GPS in conjunction with Trimble. This project led to the wide spread use of GPS across the Balfour Beatty Group. This early application also led to BBIS’s HiMaSSS GPS system, which is still being enhanced, most recently in applications to automatically check winter service route compliance for safety reasons.

John’s interest in research and development was deepened in 1997 with a 2 year partial secondment to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council where he ran their programme for Construction as a Manufacturing Process. This included the chairmanship of two review panels comprising industrial and academic participants. From this experience he maintains a network of contacts, probably unique within the industry. John was a founder member of a research interest group within the Be organisation that led to the 3 year Avanti programme, started in 2003, supported by the Dti and was invited to join the Management Board. The Dti have cited this programme as being the one most likely to have lasting impact on the industry of all the Partners in Innovation projects. John developed a unique relationship with Proctor and Gamble in 2002 to look at possible joint environmental opportunities through his recognition of their ability to solve an intractable engineering support fluid problem. The ability to make interconnections remains a strength.

John is well known in the engineering community and is a frequent lecturer and contributor to discussions and has chaired many steering groups and committees over the years. He is immediate past Chairman of the Management Board for the Centre for Innovative Construction Engineering based at Loughborough University and is a member of Bristol and Bath University’s Strategic Advisory Board for their Systems Engineering EngD. He is a Visiting Professor at Salford University and a member of the National Platform. He has a broad knowledge of European practice through his long association with the ENCORD network.

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