Atkins realigns UK business to meet evolving client needs - 11 November 2014
Atkins has announced plans to reorganise its UK business to enable it to provide higher levels of certainty and flexibility of resources and apply compatible skills and innovation across sectors to meet the evolving needs of its clients and core markets.
Against a backdrop of increasingly complex challenges, continued pressure on budgets, industry consolidation and a growing shortage of people with the right skills, the changes will enable the company to put greater emphasis on aligning more closely with its clients' business objectives and providing innovative approaches to their challenges by drawing on a wider pool of cross-sector and cross-discipline experience.
Prof Dr Uwe Krueger, chief executive officer, Atkins, said: "As our clients and markets evolve, so must we. These changes position us better to deliver the technical capabilities, resources and innovation that will help our clients meet their business goals and solve the increasingly complex challenges we face."
The new organisation, which has been co-created by Atkins' UK leadership team, involves merging some of its six UK businesses to create four larger, market-focused divisions to clients:
- The Rail and Highways & Transportation divisions will be brought together to form a 3,000-strong group of specialists whose combined skills can help solve the key transport issues.
- The Defence, Aerospace and Communications division will be combined with Management Consultants to create an enhanced client-side advisory capability and extend the engineering expertise we provide into high technology markets such as defence, aerospace and security.
- The Design & Engineering division will continue to provide a focus on buildings and infrastructure for the Energy, Defence, Aviation, Transportation, Education and Mixed Use Development sectors.
- The Water & Environment division will continue to serve its existing clients with diverse services from its water engineering, ground engineering, planning and environmental teams.
There will be no changes to Faithful+Gould or Atkins' Energy division in the UK.
To coincide with the next phase of its UK business plans and to guarantee its uninterrupted delivery, David Tonkin has decided to step down from his role as UK & Europe chief executive officer to focus on the health and wellbeing of his family and pursue a more family-centric phase of his life. David will be succeeded by Nick Roberts, who is currently strategy and growth director for Atkins' North America region. Nick has spent much of his career with consulting companies in the UK and internationally in the water and environment sector, and has held leadership roles in Atkins' UK Design & Engineering, Rail and Water & Environment divisions.
Prof Dr Krueger added: "Nick brings a wealth of knowledge from across a number of our UK markets together with an international perspective which will be extremely valuable in driving this evolution of our UK business. I would also like to thank David wholeheartedly for his dedication to Atkins over the past few years and for charting this new course for the UK & Europe region."
The transition to the new operating model will be completed by 1 April 2015. Nick Roberts will assume his post on 1 December 2014.
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Notes to editors: Atkins Atkins (www.atkinsglobal.com ) is one of the world's leading design, engineering and project management consultancies*, employing some 17,500 people across the UK, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Europe. Our people's breadth and depth of expertise and drive to ask why has allowed us to plan, design and enable some of the world's most complex and time critical projects. *15th largest global design firm (Engineering News-Record 2014) and the third largest multidisciplinary consultancy in Europe (Svensk Teknik och Design 2013). Recent projects from across the Group: Atkins is working across urban regeneration, master planning, national energy programmes, major transport schemes, water and environment projects - applying smart design solutions on projects including:
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