With members of the team having spent many years working directly for some of the major national and regional House Builders & Developers this is an area in which Onyx Construction Consultants does excel and provide a wealth of knowledge and expertise.
Another area in which our expertise and experience comes in very useful to House Builders is Groundworks and dealing with groundworker accounts.
Services
Estimating
- Assisting with Site appraisals checking surveys, soil investigation reports etc.
- Cut & Fill, muck-away calculation, waste management
- Design review
- Value engineering
- Construction budgets
Quantity Surveying
- Tender document preparation
- Subcontractor price analysis
- Subcontract negotiation
- Subcontract management and valuation
- Site valuation and cost reporting
- Variation measurement
- On site measurement and valuation
- Producing Bills of Quantities for issue to groundwork contractors
Buying
- Take off and schedule materials
- Preparation of material enquiries
- Material price analysis
Groundworker Accounts
- Review and valuation of measured works accounts
- Checking daywork submissions
- Measurement of variations
- Training surveyors to deal with and value groundworker accounts
In addition for House Builders and Developers we carry out talks and mini seminars on how to deal with groundwork variation accounts (usually the largest variation account affecting the contract costs) and what to look out for and check when running through the account. Providing an insight and tips to the tricks and methods used by groundwork subcontractors to bump up the value of those accounts.
Project Management
We offer this service combined usually with project Cost Management on multi phase Consortium projects involving the employment and management of various infrastructure and enabling contractors where the cost of their and our services are shared by more than one Developer.
It provides developers with an independent consultant to manage the overall infrastructure works while their own surveyors and construction team concentrate on their own individual phases.
We also provide the service to smaller national developers who may not have the staff to carry out the function on smaller sites or sites some distance from their head office but within easy reach of our own.
In addition to the commercial functions listed above, for Project Management we also:
- Provide a central point of contact
- Project co-ordination
- Manage the design team, local authorities and statutory services
- Issue programmes and schedules of work, progress reports
- Manage the infrastructure and enabling works contractors
Training
Over the years we at Onyx Construction Consultants have realised that our more basic take off and estimating services have become more and more in demand as a result of a number of factors such as experienced staff retiring or leaving the industry, colleges putting an emphasis on project management and elemental estimating for trainee surveyors or simply not enough time due to work load to properly train members of staff in some of the basics.
We are able to put together a programme of training at your or our offices for members of staff in some of the traditional and modern methods of measurement and surveying tailor made to your requirements including
- Basic taking off from drawings by traditional methods
- Basic taking off from drawings with digitizers with specialist software
- Basic taking off from electronic drawings on a computer screen with inexpensive / freely available software
- Material take offs
- Scheduling
- Working with and developing excel spreadsheets