Engineering & Works

The first customer in the Greater Paris area to request a technical macro lot (combined works package) was BOUYGUES, in 2006, for the renovation of the CB31 tower, now known as the First tower. But there had been harbingers before that with Nexity: when VINCI Energies won separate Electrical, Thermal and Fire Protection works packages for a high-rise to be built for the Société Générale, ultimate coordination proved difficult, and the benefits of common management were made crystal-clear.

In 2009, Claude Renaut’s Pôle Thermique et Electrique had just been set up. The first project director appointed was Lionel Guyot, previously business unit manager of Phibor Entreprises.

Several high-profile contracts were then signed with VINCI Construction France:

• the EQHO (formerly Descartes) high-rise in La Défense
• the “Allianz ARENA” stadium in Nice
• the luxury The Peninsula hotel in Paris
• the two-phase SFR campus in St Denis
• the Koutio Medipôle hospital complex in New Caledonia
• the “Paris-La Défense Arena” stadium in Nanterre
• the ADP connecting building at ORLY Airport
• the DUO towers  with Ivanhoé Cambridge
• the VINCI head office in Nanterre

Bouygues again called on the Pôle for the Crédit Agricole’s EOLE campus in Montrouge. Then the Pôle worked with BNP Paribas Immobilier on the Pont de Sèvres tower in Boulogne Billancourt and the Ecowest tower in Levallois-Perret.

If projects such as the Tribunal de grande Instance de Paris courthouse in Paris, the Direction régionale de la police judiciaire regional judicial police headquarters Batignolles and the Ségur Fontenoy block in Paris are included, the Pôle has carried out combined technical works packages with a value of nearly €700m over a nine-year period.

For nearly 10 years, it has thus acquired a one-of-a-kind project management team that can take on interface risks and handle all technical works packages for projects with a value ranging from €30 to €70 million.

The special feature of this project structure is that the individual business units remain responsible for their results. However, the technical macro lot management interfaces with the customer, manages the boundaries between the different services, ensures the technical synthesis, oversees consistency of bids and in particular costs and modifications, ensures that the business units working on the projects coordinate and support each other, and arbitrates between works packages, sometimes with the support of Pôle management.

Given the challenges, this is often a juggling act, but it is indispensable if proper overall management is to be provided. Major projects have become a proving ground for cooperation in which business units and project managers become well acquainted, forge working relationships based on trust and keep each other informed about the issues facing the other works packages.

Lionel Guyot is now managing his fourth major project: following the €37m Allianz ARENA, the €50m FIRST tower and the €61.5m “Paris-La Défense Arena“, he is now in charge of the €65m DUO towers.

As the most senior and the most capped project manager, he is respected and often specifically requested by the managers of VINCI Construction France. His projects have often been time-consuming and commercially difficult, but they have been technically fascinating challenges in which the Pôle has shown its ability to submit alternative proposals in the design stage and to improve the overall performance of the technical works packages.