Quantity Surveying Services

Quantity Surveying Services

 

Hardies have a long-established and experienced quantity surveying department that functions across multiple offices and across most sectors. Our team is headed up by Douglas Smith, a partner in our Dundee office, and supported by a team of Partners in each of the Hardies offices.

Our overarching priority is to strive to protect our clients’ interests whilst ensuring we add as much value to the overall process as we can. Ultimately, we achieve this through our extensive experience, technical skills, proactive attitude, people management, and relationship building.

Hardies understands the need to provide certainty of price, time, and quality for the Client. Our cost control procedures are geared to proactively “manage” not just reactively record or monitor costs. Identifying risks and allocating costs accordingly using risk analysis to develop a risk register is one of the keys to ensuring there are no surprises along the way.

Our Quantity Surveyors operate a proven, well-managed process – our QA system calls for continuous checking procedures, ensuring that all elements of works are captured correctly from the budgeting phase to completion of the project, and each report lists exclusions, assumptions, and cost risk items that need to be addressed prior to the next process starting.

The overall project budget always needs to be carefully managed both in terms of overall expenditure and expenditure in each financial year. Our monthly reports include a cash flow forecast showing each component of the overall project budget and how expenditure is likely to be incurred. All actual expenditures will be tracked and compared against the budget throughout the project.

Although our quantity surveying service will be tailored to the exact client needs, our general framework is based on the following elements:

Project Brief and Initial Outline Costs
Following the issue of the client’s requirements, we will assist the project team members in preparing the project brief. The available budget will be evaluated and developed into a feasibility study in tandem with design and other cost relative items.

A full report containing preliminary cost advice, cost trends, and market condition effects will be prepared and discussed with the Client. Value engineering and guidance on alternative design solutions will be incorporated as an integral part of our processes. Budgets will be discussed fully with all parties to ensure a full understanding of the cost targets and budget constraints.

Design Development
During the design development stage, Hardies will take an active role to add value from our experience and manage the cost development within the agreed budget. The pursuit of cost-effective design solutions whilst utilising market conditions and tendered design costs will be the building blocks to achieve a cost control matrix and best value solution.

Procurement & Tender
We offer expert advice around procurement whether private or public and are very experienced in all the procurement routes from traditional to management contracts. The tender and subsequent contract documents are essential for delivering a project on time and on budget and we spend a great deal of time and effort ensuring they are as robust as possible; this would include a design phase sign-off where we would check against the brief.

We have to adopt a very ‘hands-on approach to ensure the documents are of the highest quality and properly reflect the clients’ requirements as well as the needs of the project.

Construction Phase
During the construction phase variations will be valued, where possible, prior to a formal instruction being issued so that informed decisions can be made prior to committing to additional cost.

Monthly cost reports will be issued including updated cash flow forecasts and a detailed breakdown of the anticipated agreed maximum price. This cost report will include the value of all instructions issued to date and an assessment of possible variations and expenditure of risk register sums.

All valuations will be monitored on the Hardies cost control system against both budget and projected cash flow. Timely preparation of the final account will be prioritised and finalisation through negotiation on an ongoing basis is important in order to facilitate accurate reporting to the Client.

This system of reporting will also assist the Client to monitor and achieve their required cash flow and any commitments to annual expenditure from public funds in each financial year.

Communication and Reporting
Hardies are committed to achieving a high level of teamwork between all stakeholders in a project and strive to achieve this through cooperative and collaborative working practices, transparent project objectives, and effective communication in the project team.

We place emphasis on the regularity, completeness, and openness of our communication with the client. Our project cost plan and monthly reports are instrumental in achieving these objectives.

Attitude and Behaviours
Hardies Cost Managers strive to build long-term relationships wherever possible with all stakeholders. This philosophy extends to design team members and contractors as well as Clients.

We aim to deal fairly with all parties at all times, even when corrective action is being sought. Our style is not autocratic but seeks to enable people to make the maximum contribution possible.

Although every project team is different and has to be treated differently, it always helps motivation to establish a united sense of direction. This is one of the reasons that we like to develop the project cost plan in conjunction with the team.

We recognise the benefit of establishing short-term goals that can be achieved and also of creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust between the Client, Cost Manager, and design team.

Multi-Discipline Practice
Hardies provide Building Surveying, Quantity Surveying, and Principal Designer services which means that our project managers can draw upon the expertise of their colleagues when additional advice is required to address a particular issue.

Douglas Smith - Partner

Douglas Smith MRICS

Regional Partner & Head of Quantity Surveying

Contact: douglas.smith@hardies.co.uk

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