Commissioning engineers certainly don't have an easy life, but Roger Carlin of Ashford Environmental Services believes they can have a rewarding one.
The revisions to Part L of the Building Regulations will place commissioning right at the heart of the country's efforts to reduce carbon emissions from buildings. Under the new regulations, which come into force in April 2010 (possibly delayed until October), designers are required to provide building control officers with a commissioning plan along with their design documents.

This means that commissioning managers should become increasingly influential members of the professional team - a status they have not always received despite the importance of their role.
Roger Carlin, managing director of £5M turnover commissioning and water treatment specialists Ashford Environmental Services, knows all about the rough and tumble having been involved since the late 1970s.

'Commissioning management is totally dependent on how other people have chosen to structure the contract,' he says. 'You often end up in a position where you have all the responsibility, but no authority. Making things happen in this situation is very difficult and sometimes impossible.
'As commissioning manager you have an involvement in all aspects of the project across all disciplines, but if you don't have the contractual teeth, people can ignore you. This can lead to conflict.'

It sounds like a thankless task and Carlin confirms it can be an extremely frustrating job, but he has found it ultimately fulfilling and sees the role becoming increasingly important.

Commissioning firms often fizzle out when the founding directors retire, but Carlin and his business partner Tony Kennedy have always wanted more for Ashford since they set the business up in 1997.



The company has just been accepted as a member of the HVCA and the two founders see this as a key element in their strategy for putting the business on a sound long-term footing by making it a big player in the wider building services community.

'We both wanted to create a sustainable business rather than just make a few quid,' says Carlin, and a glance at his career provides plenty of evidence that he has always been destined to build a significant business even if the path has not always been smooth.

Like many commissioning engineers, Roger started as an apprentice with Haden Young and gained his HND following study at Wandsworth College and London South Bank University. However, when his apprenticeship ended he found himself in the middle of the recession of the early '80s and out of work.

Having worked closely with commissioning firm D&C Group on the Devonshire House refurbishment project during his apprenticeship, he accepted a position as commissioning engineer there and stayed for seven years. Starting as a hands-on commissioning engineer, his technical knowledge coupled with his experience as part of a contracts team enabled him to rise rapidly to lead engineer within two years and field manager within five.

By the late '80s he was ready for another challenge and formed a partnership with another former D&C engineer, but again the timing was not great and that arrangement was cut short by the next recession and Roger went to work for CML.

'I always wanted to try the commissioning management role, but there was a reluctance to let me do that at CML. After two years, I left to join Commtech and was seconded to Laing Management at the British Library as mechanical commissioning manager,' he recalls.

When that project ended it was back to CML, which offered him the 50 Trident Square project and an opportunity to move into a more senior role. 'But it didn't happen and, after completing Triton, I found myself writing O&M manuals. In the end I realised, if I were going to satisfy my entrepreneurial tendencies, I would have to set up a new company.'

Carlin's experience of all aspects of the commissioning business has stood him in good stead and helped him create a culture at Ashford that, he believes, will allow the business to grow and prosper in the future.

He adds the secret is establishing good relationships with both clients and staff: 'Some staff need a cuddle and others a big stick; the secret is finding which works best and developing mutual respect. Clients, on the other hand, are a different prospect. All are demanding and often have unrealistic expectations, but we will go further than most to respond and we have gained a lot of respect for that over the years.'

Going further than most can also be costly as Carlin and his team discovered on the 50 Queen Anne's Gate project when a series of problems tied up a good proportion of his workforce on site for 18 months and cost the company a lot of potential business.

'We learned from that and moved on,' he says sanguinely.
The company quickly outgrew the serviced offices in Feltham ,moving twice to larger offices before relocating to its own headquarters in Staines, Middlesex six years ago. It now has more than 100 engineers in the field - most directly employed - and has rapidly developed a water treatment arm that accounts for 40% of its annual £5M turnover.

Good opportunities

'We wanted to grow and diversify into other sectors and I realised there was a big opportunity when we were offered our first combined contract by Haden Young in 1998 and had to let out the water treatment,' says Carlin.

'More and more clients were asking for the combined role. This worked for us because we can't commission it if it isn't clean,' he points out. 'Even when we employed the flushing contractor and had financial control, we still had difficulty controlling the quality.

'We continued to sub out our water treatment work for the next four years, but the intention was always to bring it in house; the difficulty was finding the key staff.' After a long search, the ideal candidate found them. 'During a conversation with Jason Bruce, one of our senior commissioning engineers, I discovered he had previously spent ten years in water treatment. Jason accepted an offer to head up the new flushing and water treatment division and the rest, as they say, is history.'

Larger projects

The two disciplines sit together neatly and Ashford has since carried out progressively larger projects, the largest so far being the £230M 1,000-bed Queens Hospital in Romford, Essex. The company has also picked up a ten-year contract for closed systems monitoring and maintenance at the hospital showing the value of being able to offer a full package of services.

As the company grows, so it needs to have a supply of skilled and qualified people to deliver the projects. Carlin has just completed a two-year term as chairman of the Commissioning Specialists Association (CSA) where, among other things, he helped the CSA Distance Learning training scheme achieve NVQ accreditation last year after a five-year struggle.

'It is so important that the profession now has a qualification that is recognised beyond the industry,' says Carlin. 'Ours is a relatively small sector and is not seen by many young people as a potential career, but it should appeal to many technically minded school leavers. It is challenging because you require a good understanding of all the disciplines in building services.'
He worries the current recession will make it harder to build up the workforce the industry needs because employers are reluctant to recruit apprentices. Ashford, however, plans to take on four new apprentices this summer alongside more experienced engineers.

However, he feels commissioning struggles for recognition among other members of the supply chain and industry. 'Commissioning is under-appreciated and often regarded as too expensive,' he says. 'People don't recognise the technical rigour required.'

Commissioning is, clearly, nobody's idea of an easy option and the frustrations are many, but for people who enjoy varied engineering challenges it can be extremely fulfilling as Ashford's success proves.