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Paul Sims strides into the office, red face, red hair. "I am not happy!" he storms. "And I've only been round the ground floor." He's a big man and an impressive sight in full sail.

Sims has returned from a week's holiday to find that his computer is not working, his bosses are en route and an unexpected journalist is waiting to see him. And things on site are obviously not to his liking.

The cause of Sims' frustration is Bovis Lend Lease's £90m Unilever House refurbishment on the banks of the Thames in central London. This is a model project, so although it's somehow reassuring to learn that even the best project managers have bad days, it's difficult to imagine what it is in particular that has riled Sims.

There's no big setback, however, just a minor hold-up somewhere. The thing is, it's not enough for Sims to be the best. The CIOB's Construction Manager of the Year 2004 wants this project to go down in history and that's what he's pushing for.

To this end, Sims has done everything in his power to maximise the productivity of his workforce. That means efficient management of trade contractors, unrivalled welfare facilities and, significantly, a logistics programme which delivers materials as they are needed.

"You have to make sure you can build it with less people," explains Sims. "There is a shrinking labour pool. The fewer people there are, the safer it will be, the faster it will go.

"If the trade contractors make money, they will want to give you their best people again and the guys will want to work on your jobs again because they will be making good money."

He believes his tactics will work and has employed research body BSRIA to carry out a ‘time and motion'-type study to find out if the site really is more efficient.

As an operations director at Bovis, Sims oversees all the contractor's projects with Stanhope, which total six including Unilever. His position means he doesn't really need to run a project, but he's not ready to hang up the hard hat yet: "I came into this business because I really enjoy building. Sometimes a little success can pull you away from what you enjoy doing."

Technical challenge

Fresh from success at the City of London's Paternoster Square, he chose Unilever House as his next project because it excited him. "It was the most different thing we were doing in the business," he says. "It wasn't just another office block, although it is providing an office. There was the technical challenge in terms of demolition and environmental challenges.

And logistically this offered the biggest challenge of any project I have worked on."

His challenge has involved getting materials to and from the building, which is on the corner of Victoria Embankment and Blackfriars Bridge, two major routes through London, next to Blackfriars Tube and mainline stations, from which 8,000 people an hour emerge during rush hour. A red route means there is just one entrance to the site from a side road - and that's next to a five-star hotel.

Unilever built its London headquarters in
1930. Over the years additions and alterations rendered it unsuitable for the way Unilever operates today. The sections of the building which remain from its original form, the facade and entrance hall which has been used as a dining area but will be restored to its original use, are grade II listed.

The refurbishment started with the removal of the inside of the building, leaving the two outside edges of the building on the triangular corner plot intact. The two edge strips have been widened from 11m to 21m and floors five to eight will be linked across an atrium by glass bridges to ‘flying carpets', trapezoidal floors suspended from the roof by stainless steel wires.

Digging in

Work started on site with the soft strip in October 2004. Demolition specialist Griffiths McGee used 500 tonnes of steel to support the facade while it demolished the four fingers which made up the inside of the building.

The demolition took around 10 months, but McGee came up with an idea which allowed the foundations to go in while the building was coming down. It dug 14 caissons, which now support the atrium and three stair cores, by hand, each taking around eight weeks.

"It cost us slightly more, but it probably got us away three months earlier than we would have done," says Sims.

The building was topped out in March, and the transfer of the flying carpets from the temporary steel installed by William Hare to their permanent supports was imminent when CM visited site in April.

Despite the innovations in design and building, the project is more likely to make construction history for its use of logistics. Wilson James is supplying all products and materials to the site from a construction consolidation centre in Bermondsey, south London. Unilever House provided the challenge which got the idea off the ground.

Although Wilson James has used the same system at Heathrow Terminal 5 for five years, the Bermondsey centre is aims to supply multiple projects and multiple clients.

Currently it supplies Unilever and three other Bovis/Stanhope jobs. Wilson James MD Gary Sullivan hopes that two or three other projects will soon join up.

You agree a programme that’s safe for the client and safe for you. then you try and squeeze the juice out of it

Paul Sims, Bovis Lend Lease

"It's been an ambition of mine for some time to have one or even more consolidation centres servicing major conurbations," says Sullivan.

"I truly believe it is the right way forward."

Transport for London agrees with him. It is contributing £1.6m of the £3.2m cost of running a two-year pilot of the centre and £200,000 for a data capture study with Constructing Excellence. Bovis/Stanhope (and their contractors) are contributing £1.1m and Wilson James £0.5m.

Rather than dozens of lorries congregating at the Unilever House site, materials are delivered to a warehouse in Bermondsey and safely stored. Each day Wilson James sends out lorries with the materials that each trade contractor needs. Its specially trained staff then take the materials to the workface and bring pallets, empty drums and packaging back, a practice known as ‘reverse logistics'.

The benefits are many: less traffic so less pollution and congestion; safer roads; less waste due to damaged materials; more efficient use of labour because it is not being used to fight over who gets the hoist to transport bricks or pipes.

Sullivan is not concerned that he is taking on the risk for lost or damaged materials. He's had three minor incidents at Heathrow. "For years and years construction has relied on unskilled labour. They sweep the floors, empty bins and hump materials up the stairs. They don't care if they knock the corners off, because they won't be around tomorrow.

"If you give people good terms and conditions, proper employment status and a career path, if you give people respect, they give it in return."

Sims estimates the centre has reduced the number of labourers on site by about 30 and that means lower costs. "We have had reductions offered against every package that's using the centre for the amount of time it's going to save them," says Sims. Reductions vary from package to package depending on who traditionally takes deliveries.

"If the trade contracts go well, they may increase the money that goes to the consolidation centre," says Sims. Is this really likely? "We have had trade contractors reduce their price at the end of a project," insists Sims.

"That has happened before."

Best-case scenario

The contract is due to complete in February 2007. However, Sims is aiming to beat that date. "You agree a programme that's safe for the client and safe for you. Then you try and squeeze the juice out of it," he says. This involves asking the trade contractors to come up with their best-case scenario. These are all linked to come up with the best case programme.

Because Bovis/Stanhope negotiates all its contracts, and pays for trade contractors' design time before a package is let, contractors should be able to price and programme more accurately. And that should be reflected in what Bovis is paying. "If you say to someone ‘we are going to pay you £15,000 for you to send someone down to site for the design meetings for the next 10 weeks and when we give you the order we want you to take £15,000 off because you have learned more about the job and therefore there's less risk in there for you' nobody says no," argues Sims.

Obviously, says Sims, the project's end date moves because those original estimates may have been made without a complete design, or there may be a shortage of a particular material. But as far as the client is concerned the end date remains the same. "Three months beforehand you start to tell the client there's a chance that they might get the building early."

Trade contractors who finish early get prelims refunded and there is a system to alert follow-on trades. Three months before their planned start date, that date can be varied by four weeks, although Sims says they have never been that far out. At two months, it's a fortnight and at one month, a week.

"The challenge for them is to be open and honest about what they are achieving," says Sims. "The biggest frustration is people telling you a month before that they are ready when they are not going to be ready. If someone fails because something has gone wrong, no problem. If someone fails knowing they would never have been able to achieve it, that's different."

It all comes down to personal commitments, says Sims. Every month all 24 trade contractors' directors sit down at a meeting and tell the others what will be happening. Many of them have sat down together at similar meetings on previous jobs, because Bovis negotiates all its trade contracts mostly with firms it has used before. "Newcomers see that it's good fun, but they also know that they can get shown up in front of their peers," says Sims of the meetings.

It's probably a mistake for trade contractors or Bovis staff to try to get anything past Sims. "One of the difficulties I have is staying away from the detail because it's what I like." Does that make him a nightmare to work for? "Without a shadow of a doubt," he responds, adding:

"For good people it's no problem. For people who aren't up to speed, it can be painful."

Does he get angry? "I used to," he responds, but then remembers his earlier outburst and says: "You can be as nice and as analytical as you like but sometimes you have to show your colours. And I do that in different ways to different people."

He explains that the reason he was riled when he looked round site that morning was because one trade contractor had held up another by failing to complete work on one area and no one had sorted it. That sort of thing just isn't part of the plan at Unilever House.