TPS innovation competition

At the end of 2007 TPS launched an internal innovation competition open to all staff members, with the aim to encourage and recognise innovative thinking which improves the way we work, from the simplest internal processes through to the delivery of the largest projects for our clients. Very often good ideas are deceptively simple and have been implemented by individuals or teams without realisation that they are brilliantly innovative and could be of great benefit elsewhere in the business. The competition has helped to focus such ideas and draw attention to them.

The prize is awarded to the most innovative proposal from a team or individual which, in the opinion of TPS Managing Director Frank Huidobro, best demonstrates strength, effectiveness and an advantage or benefit to TPS and its clients.

The competition attracted 26 excellent and highly detailed entries and represented a considerable bed-time reading challenge for Frank who, after much deliberation, chose four finalists whose ideas particularly met the criteria:

• Phil Mutter, a structural engineer in Croydon, whose idea for the Project Datatran Filing System originated with his own photographic collection system at home and has spread to a means of managing drawing files in TPS which has significantly reduced errors and cost within the business.
• Kevin Orriss, a project manager based on site in Feltham, who has worked with the Ministry of Defence in a completely new role to deal with complex waste issues at a facilioty in Greater London, reducing their costs by £75,000 per annum and increased the amount of recycled waste from zero to 80%.
• Alun Rae, a civil engineer in our Edinburgh office, presented a simple but highly effective way of managing and tracking client changes to ensure our profitability is protected as well as providing a full audit trail for the client.
• Simon Tanner, a civil engineer on site at Heathrow, who designed a completely new way of dealing with very large diameter power cables into units contained within the confines of an aircraft stand at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, whilst adopting BAA's ethos “if it can be pre-fabricated, it will be pre-fabricated”!

All four were excellent entries and worthy finalists.

In late June the finalists were invited to present their ideas to their colleagues and to field questions from the floor.  To achieve this with the greatest effect naturally required an innovative approach, so TPS successfully ran a combined telephone, video and web conference between all four main offices in Croydon, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Wolverhampton, enabling staff at these locations to participate in a single event.

The session helped Frank reach a final decision. He says “the choice of an overall winning entry was very, very challenging, as you can imagine, and my final decision is that Kevin Orriss and his Waste Strategy for the MoD is the overall winner. Kevin's submission demonstrated innovation on a number of levels, from providing a new service to the client, using Carillion's in-house sustainability experts, to finding a way of meeting the clients criteria of less cost, less pollution and less landfill and bringing this all together in a successful solution that achieved all of the above and delighted our client. Well done and congratulations on your well deserved win!”  

  Read more about the Waste Strategy for MoD

Following the success of this first competition, at the end of the year TPS will be inviting our people to submit entries for the best innovative idea of 2008.

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