The Emmanuel Christian Community School (ECCS) West Wing Redevelopment, located at the existing ECCS campus in Girrawheen, includes the demolition of the existing West Wing single storey classroom building and the construction of a new two-storey classroom building. The new building comprises of an 11 new classrooms, store rooms, balcony terraces and plazas, and a fire pump room in the basement level. This redevelopment also included some external paving and landscaping works.
At the cost planning stage, Rawlinsons were engaged to provide a Design Development (DD) Estimate and Pre-Tender Estimate (PTE). Rawlinsons were able to attend workshops with the project architects Hartree + Associates to be able to flesh out the design and capture associated costs. The DD documents were still being developed as we wererequested to provide an estimate, so our workshops and correspondence with the Hartree + Associates during this stage was essential to be able to represent costs soundly. The big cost item that was captured during these discussions and not yet documented was the whole basement level that was no required to accommodate the fire pump and tanks. Initially, the design did not allow for a fire pump system and certainly not a basement level, Rawlinsons then worked off the project team’s verbal advice and put costs against these items to capture the costs, which is obviously extremely difficult to do without design documented yet. Nevertheless, costs estimated were accurate and reasonable. Furthermore, Rawlinsons also factored in all costs associated with the construction complexities of this project. This redevelopment was carried out on an existing school campus which was being constructed in an operational environment. This added costs to the project due to inefficiencies with time, additional coordination, and latent conditions all of which was factored into the project costs. The Pre-tender estimate, in fact, ended up being carried out after the tendering stage due to constraints the overall programme. Therefore, Rawlinsons carried out this PTE to be able to soundly proceed with the tender analysis process.
In the end, Rawlinsons were within 0.2% of the lowest tender (5 tenders)received which was an extremely good result given the nature of the project. Rawlinsons continued services with Contract Administration during the construction phase where we carried out all progress claim valuations and variation assessments and recommendations. The project seen ongoing delays and construction cost hikes as it commenced as COVID-19 came into play. This added another complexity factor which no party accounted for, nevertheless, we were able to work from home during extended lockdown periods to provide ongoing advice and valuations. Once lockdowns halted, Rawlinsons attended monthly site meetings to help mitigate cost and programme variances the project was now experiencing. This also included extensive correspondence with the project team to help control costs. We requested that all instructions be first filtered through ourselves to provide the Project Team with the cost implications. Furthermore, Rawlinsons continuously met and corresponded with the Contractor to resolve variations costs which we were able to significantly reduce to keep within our recommended budget.
The project is now complete and operational and Rawlinsons is extremely proud of its excellent services that went beyond our contracted duties. We helped manage the correspondence with the Contractor and their concerns to the project team, met regularly with the contractor to resolve issues, and provide advice on the trajectory of the project at key milestones.
