Founded in 1921, Knight Piésold is the oldest established civil
consulting company in Southern Africa. Exec Digital look at its operations, policies, and a few salient domestic projects
By John O'Hanlon
Despite what Jan van Vuuren, Director and until recently manager of Knight Piésold’s roads division, calls a bit of a dip in its core mining activities caused by the global recession, so many and varied are the major infrastructure projects already under way in South Africa that this leading consulting group still has plenty to keep it busy in its own backyard. “We are very busy in the water construction and, with the construction of large dams, roads and pipelines, we are involved in most of the biggest projects progressing throughout the country,” he says.
Road, rail and river
Pressed to identify flagship projects, he picks naturally enough a road project that still takes up a large chunk of his time; a major portion worth R2 billion (about £150 million) of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP). This project, with an overall value of some R30 billion, is designed to relieve the ever growing problem of traffic congestion
on the freeway network of the business hub of the country. The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) has given this project a very high priority, not least because South Africa is hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2010 and wants the first phase out of the way by the time the visitors start to arrive!
The Gauteng road system project also typifies a couple of other realities in which Knight Piésold excels, van Vuuren points out: “When a bid comes in, we like to set up a single purpose joint venture company with major partners.” The JV may include the general contractor and, as required in South Africa, an emerging enterprise under the BEE (black economic empowerment) scheme – for example the main contractor for GFIP is the international construction firm Group 5, and local partner Siyavaya Consulting comprising several smaller emerging construction companies. A separate contract was awarded by SANRAL to Knight Piésold’s environmental department.
Knight Piésold has a very strong geotechnical section that has been involved in extensive slope stability and foundation design for the Gautrain project, an 80-kilometre mass rapid transit railway system that will relieve road traffic congestion in the Pretoria/Johannesburg/OR Tambo International Airport corridor by a further 20 percent.
The Gauteng Provincial Government’s partnership with local and international business claims to be the biggest public-private partnership in Africa and the final bill for Gautrain is likely to reach R24 billion.
Other major projects he identifies are the R2 billion Western Aqueduct project that will supply water to Durban, a pipeline that involves the installation of over 50 kilometres of steel pipes and two large break pressure tanks. “We are also in a consortium with the two other main consultants on the de Hoop Dam project for the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. This project involves an 80 metre high roller compacted concrete structure on the Steelpoort River to stabilise water supply to the fast-growing mining and associated residential developments in that part of the Limpopo Province.”
Black economic empowerment
BEE is a method of transformation in South Africa, which Knight Piésold supports, states Operations Director, Vishal Haripersad. It’s not affirmative action, but it aims to level the playing field for previously disadvantaged groups.
“It has an impact on the way we select joint venture partners, of course. A significant percentage of time and money is spent, either in training emerging consultants, or giving them commercial access to parts of the project.”
That might look like a restriction, but it’s a real opportunity, he says. “We accommodate this transformation drive in the development of our policy and our culture. The partners we have chosen over the years have been an asset to the projects that we have worked on and we often find that because of our experience, as well as the level of trust and faith that the client has in us, that we are able to select very competent joint venture partners.”
It doesn’t matter how big or small the other JV partners are; Knight Piésold generally enters as an equal partner with some of the much larger companies as running projects efficiently is one of our strengths, says van Vuuren. “That is the case with the Berg River Dam near Franschhoek, which is another multi-billion rand project to supply water to Cape Town.”
Knight Piésold is a JV partner on this project, as well as the mega Ingula pumped storage scheme under construction to augment the national power grid.
Global Management System
Haripersad and van Vuuren jump from project to massive project so rapidly that one wonders how they keep track of them all. Perhaps the answer lies in the Global Management System (GMS) that the Knight Piésold Group developed to manage its complex international operations: it has offices in the USA, Canada, Chile, Peru and Australia and only about 20 percent of its revenue is actually generated within South Africa.
“A few years ago we identified the need to optimise our project management processes and at the same time take advantage of the power of the internet,” says Haripersad. “So we created a company-wide online project management system whereby every project is available to all the offices in the Knight Piésold Group.”
The system also carries all the budget and data control information for each project. It represents a significant investment for the company, since it is entirely home grown, home managed, and is in continuous development under a specially created section with its own coordinator.
And it is secure: five servers around the world provide backup for the entire system in case of any mishap or interruption. “On the IT side, I think we’re up there with the best in the world as we have a very efficient system in place to manage projects optimally.” It’s an integral part of Knight Piésold’s quality management process, and feeds into its ISO 9001 quality auditing, he says.
“It gives us, as senior management, a quick and easy ability to view projects and check on their status as well as the performance of managers and staff, project by project, and to be able to control aspects like booking of time to projects and budgets.”
The GMS is not an accounting system, and each office runs its own financial system according to local regulation. However, the group shares the latest available AutoCAD and AutoCAD Civil 3D and design software for specialised functions like hydrogeology, mining and construction.
That’s routine, but proprietary data is the lifeblood of this company and Haripersad points out recent investment in upgrades to ensure that its IP and e-mail traffic between its seven offices in South Africa and those in neighbouring Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho and Botswana is as reliable as it can be, given what he diplomatically calls infrastructure constraints.
“We realised a long time ago that e-mail is a vital communications and project tool, but it can also be a burden on managing the quality of your work because of the ability of e-mails to make copies of documents, not knowing which version is the latest and so on.
“The Global Management System now provides us with an easy avenue to control the progress and the quality control of the documents and reports in our possession and is fully auditable.”
The next generation engineers
We spoke of BEE, which is a unique opportunity that South African firms have to tap into an enormous pool of latent talent.
Trained engineers are limited in South Africa and get snapped up quickly, so good people management is vital for Knight Piésold – and getting into a bidding war for staff is not the answer, Haripersad says.
“Knight Piésold places great emphasis on building a good talent pipeline and we believe we need to nurture and grow talent right from the school level, identify those with potential early and bring them into the system. We also believe strongly in giving back to the community and maximising the opportunity that provides.”
As with IT, project management, partnering and client service, Jan van Vuuren and Vishal Haripersad believe that Knight Piésold has the edge on its competition where people management is concerned. Perhaps the most important thing of all is to have incentives that are not just about money.
“As we are fortunate in working on some of the biggest projects within Southern Africa, we like to expose our young staff to these projects early, thereby gaining valuable experience.”
View Digital Corporate Profile of KnightPiesold in Construction Digital June 2009