Global consultancy aim of Worley

By Tom Clarke

CREATING a New Zealand-based global engineering and management consultancy is the aim of Dr Ian Parton, the managing director of Worley Group Ltd.

To achieve that the company has to do more than send people overseas to work on projects, he says.

"I think our future lies in us making the transition to becoming a global company, where we have a number of off-shore operations which are all linked back to a New Zealand base," Dr Parton says.

The consultancy already has registered offices with permanent staff in Melbourne, Brisbane, Suva, Jakarta, Bangkok and Dacca, and also has project offices in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Some have been established for many years, working on an on-going string of projects.

Dr Parton says the company has been involved in projects in Asia for 30 years, and more than 40 per cent of its business now comes from overseas.

Worley Group, which is the largest New Zealand-owned engineering and management consultancy, has an ownership structure which arose largely out of the share market crash.

Until then the consultancy operated as a partnership. Dr Parton says that being able to offer people a stake in the company at a time when trading was really difficult, was probably the factor that had the biggest single impact in turning it around.

Worley has 400 staff, 110 of whom are shareholders. It has just appointed six new principals to the company.

They are: Barry Potter, the buildings business group manager, who has been with the company since 1995; Adrian Muir, the building services group manager, who has 18 years' international experience in client liaison, design, project management and contract administration; Warwick Busch, an asset management specialist, who leads the asset management group; and Colin Newton, a civil engineer with 24 years' experience in geotechnical, hydropower and water resource engineering, who is the national manager of the hydropower and water resources team.

David Burton, with experience in resource management and planning, is a senior planner in Worley's Hamilton office, while Mike Tucker heads the power and energy group for Australia and New Zealand, based in Wellington.

Dr Parton says the ownership formula has been very successful.

"It has been a very strong performance motivator for the company and we've been able to use it as a significant reward mechanism," he says.

"The movers and shakers and the people who generate the business, get allocated more shares. It goes round in a circle because the more successful the company is, the more shares they get, and the more they get the harder they work and the more successful we are."

Dr Parton says to sustain the company it needs to develop overseas work as a bigger part of its business and there are plans to grow the company significantly, especially in Australia and Asia.

It established a power group across the Tasman earlier this year, and by the end of this year it is expected to be the largest transmission/distribution consulting business in Australia. It has already been successful in winning a number of big contracts there and other services are to be established.

Worley also plans to consolidate its position in Asian countries which are now starting to show some growth again.