King & Moffatt Building Services has over 40 years’ experience as mechanical and electrical contractors throughout Ireland, the UK and Europe. UK Managing Director Jonathon Pugh and Business Development Manager Stephen Kiely outlined the range of company projects in discussion with Phil Nicholls.
When Birmingham City Council wanted to rede velop the Alexander
Stadium ahead of hosting another round of interna tional events, the council worked with King & Moffatt, the go-to contractors for complex engineering projects across Europe. This latest flagship development was com pleted earlier this year and King & Moffatt continues its involve ment at the international athletics stadium with the ongoing maintenance contract throughout and after the Commonwealth Games have been hosted here in 2022. Both are involved in the legacy development, returning the stadium to the council after the Commonwealth Games.
“The stadium has been a real standout project for the com pany,” explained Business Development Manager Stephen Kiely. “This high-profile project in the UK involved the design and installation for renovation and a new stand. The work on the sta dium for Birmingham City Council was primarily to prepare the venue for athletics, but the site is already being shared as a repur posed venue for other sporting events and activities.”
King & Moffatt Building Services was founded in 1978 by Pat King and John Moffatt in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland. The com pany began as an electrical contractor, working for several major food production companies in Ireland. When these food compa nies expanded in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, King & Moffatt accompanied them to deliver new facilities. Business con tinued growing in the UK, and King & Moffatt UK was established in 2008.
The Carrick-on-Shannon headquarters now totals 40,000 sqft, including a training facility, and is specially fitted-out for mechan ical and electrical prefabrication. The UK division has offices in Birmingham, Stoke, Edinburgh and Wolverhampton. The group has 400 directly employed personnel, 160 of which are in the UK. Over the past 12 months, the UK division has generated £80 mil
lion turnover, up from £65 mil lion last year, operating within the annual group turnover of £135 million.
Embracing technology
“What sets King & Moffatt apart from competitors,” said Managing Director UK Jonathon Pugh, “is our ability to design and build internally. We’ve got in-house design engineers, we’ve got our own BIM modellers and managers, as well as preconstruc tion teams.” By providing a complete package of services to clients, King & Moffatt also has an offsite pre-fabrication facility, a full FM with asset management taken into account using the BIM tech nology in early design, and an aftersales energy team for an offering that stands out from the competition.
“We are an innovative company,” Mr Kiely agreed, “and have embraced many new technologies such as BIM, VR and AR in recent years. King & Moffatt is now bringing that same energy on the path to digital transformation.
“Digitalisation is essential to staying competitive within our industry, where we see greater volumes of data than ever before. We have many different software systems bringing together data from all areas of our work. King & Moffatt has digital capabilities such as Scanto-BIM, which help distinguish us from our competitors.”
Embracing technology at King & Moffatt is a response to the evolving requirements of the market and enables the company to work closely with clients, according to Mr Pugh: “Things like the preconstruction, the coordination through BIM, IT and using on-screen technology means we can do things very reactively and at speed.”
Innovative projects
Recent growth for King & Moffatt has come from a range of busi ness segments including logistics, airport hangars and film stu dios. However, the depth and range of the company’s capabilities are best illustrated by examining a handful of its latest projects.
The £72 million redevelopment of the 41-acre Alexander Stadium complex in Birmingham created a world-class, dynamic venue and supports the long-term regeneration of the city.
Yet, King & Moffatt’s innovative constructions include more than this one project. Another highlight was the world-class food production facility for DO & CO at London Heathrow Airport. This brand new 250,000 sqft production and distribu tion site provides gourmet catering for airlines such as British Airways. The facility consists of commercial kitchens, storage and processing areas, along with extensive office, meeting and presentation spaces. This development earned King & Moffatt a nomination in the international category of the Irish Construction Excellence Awards 2022.
An even larger King & Moffatt construction was the £300 mil lion SmartParc food production campus at Derby. This state-ofthe-art campus-style food manufacturing hub develops sustainable food production for the future. The 1.8 million sqft collaborative site is specifically designed to address the chal lenges facing the food industry, featuring cutting-edge manu facturing facilities, central distribution, start-up incubation units and a potential location for a Food Manufacturing Technology Centre of Excellence.
The parent King & Moffatt group has expanded rapidly in mainland Europe over the past couple of years, and is a key part of its overall future strategy. The group has subsidiaries estab lished in Germany and the Netherlands, with the majority of European work in the chosen key sectors of food, logistics, life
sciences, manufacturing and data centres. Recent work includes a major distribution centre in Munich for a global logistics company and a pharmaceutical project in Amsterdam.
A caring business model
King & Moffatt’s business model has evolved in recent years, but one constant has been how it remains first and foremost a clientcentric business. King & Moffatt views clients as partners and considers it a success when clients in turn view the company as partners.
“Communication with partners is key,” explained Mr Kiely. “We are open as a company and work with clients as a team. We see our selves as partners to our key clients and to our suppliers and sub contractors. We have a high percentage of repeat business because we work closely with our clients: this is at the heart of the King & Moffatt business model.”
“We are understanding with our supply chain partners,” said Mr Pugh, “to the point that if one of our suppliers has a slack period, then we support them and move them to a site where maybe they’re not actually required, just to keep them in our supply chain This works really well both ways, because they then support us when we’re working under pressure on a particular project or site.”
Green operations
Sustainability is also part of King & Moffatt’s business model with paperless offices and robust environmental reporting on carbon reduction. Operations in the UK benefit from the central King & Moffatt offsite manufacturing facility, as Mr Pugh noted: “The
“We are open as a company and work with clients as a team. We see our selves as partners to our key clients and to our suppliers and subcontractors. We have a high percentage of repeat business because we work closely with our clients: this is at the heart of the King & Moffatt business model”
central off-site is fundamental because there’s less wastage, as we can use the materials on two or three different projects.
“Having a single location for materials coming in reduces not just the carbon footprint, but also the packaging, because we buy in bulk which reduces the amount of packaging and waste.”
King & Moffatt also engages in impressive sustainable building projects. A recent example of this is the McCormick Foods manufacturing facility near Peterborough in central England. The project applied the UK Green Building Council Net Zero Carbon Buildings Framework to help deliver net zero carbon in both construction and operations, the highest level of commitment in the framework. The factory will operate with renewable energy, reduced water consumption, state-of-the-art refrigeration and energy-efficient steam generators.
In the present economic climate, King & Moffatt is juggling the chal lenges of inflation, skills shortages and supply chain disruptions.
“One of the key ways we approach this is by educating our apprentices and trainees, who we believe are the best in the
industry,” explained Mr Kiely. “One way we retain people is by investing heavily in technology, giving our team the best tools possible to do their jobs. King & Moffatt wants to ensure that our people get a sense of achievement and satisfaction from car rying out their jobs, and one way we do that is through software and automation.”
“The fortunate part about how we work with our client base,” Mr Pugh concluded, “is our shorter delivery programme com pared to a lot of our competitors. So, a lot of our projects evolve very quickly, moving onto site very quickly and then quickly delivered. King & Moffatt doesn’t have two-year lead times hit by delayed deliveries and price increases. We are quite fortu nate in that respect, but there are still challenges.
“When we start with a customer we service them incredibly well, fixing ourselves onto the client and becoming an adopted arm of their company, of their business. This sets King & Moffatt apart from the competition because the customer has trust in us as we have faith in them.”
KING MOFFATT
