Ward’s Words: ECI

As you will have seen in our special announcement last week, the European Construction Institute (ECI) has become part of BRE alongside Constructing Excellence. ECI is a very similar body to us, and one I have known for over 20 years since working with them on a post-Latham report on Partnering in the Public Sector.

Like us they have a membership covering owners/clients and across the supply chain, including BP, Shell, BG Group, Fluor, Bechtel, McKinsey, and interestingly we hardly have any duplicate membership. The difference is that they focus on the engineering construction sector, covering major project sectors like oil and gas, petrochem, pharma and other industrial process sectors, and also have membership in Benelux and Italy with plans to expand further in Europe. You can read more about them below and on their website, it is striking that the challenges they face are so similar to those in building and civil engineering, so I am expecting a lot of value from shared learning.

We have already integrated the back-office operation so that the same Constructing Excellence team will also service ECI. For members this means that you now have membership of two organisations for the price of one! (There are no plans to drop their name and branding, it is well established in their sector). In the not-too-distance future I hope we will organize some sort of joint event to showcase what they do, and visa versa on what Constructing Excellence does to their members, so look out for that. Meanwhile we will start to communicate news about their core direction groups on Project delivery; Leadership and people development; Innovation and technology; and Safety, health, environment and quality. Any Constructing Excellence member wishing to learn more or participate in any of the groups should contact our office for details of how to connect.

Don’t forget the members forum on October 10th – register here. The co-chairs will be launching our new vision based on the work we did at the last forum in June and subsequent meetings with external bodies over the summer. We will also ask ECI to give an overview of what they do.