Winners of the 2017 Consultancy and Engineering Awards announced
ACE, UK’s association for engineering consulting, has announced the winners of its 2017 Consultancy and Engineering Awards. Eleven awards handed out, with keynote awards for Best UK Business Performance, SME going to IMC Worldwide, and Best UK Business Performance, Large Firm presented to Curtins.
Every year the Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE) organises the Consultancy and Engineering Awards, a ceremony to showcase best practice for the global engineering consulting community, with the annual gala in London attended by business leaders from across the industry.
In addition to traditional business progress categories, the awards showcase triumphs in categories reflecting challenges faced by our industry, in a tumultuous era of political and market fluctuations, with winners selected by a judging panel of experts in their respective areas of prowess.
As the Awards continued to gain notoriety, the process this year was highly competitive, and judges remarked that the challenge to to select just one winner had been so great that five runners up had received newly implemented Highly Commended recognitions, in addition to the eleven category winners.
Best Firms
Winners of Best UK Business Performance by an SME, IMC Worldwide, were subsequently joined by Highly Commended GESL, who narrowly missed out on the Brunel-sponsored award, while Willis Towers Watson’s gong for Best UK Business Performance for a Large Firm went to engineering consultancy Curtins, with High Commendation going to BWB. IMC also picked up the Pennington Manches-sponsored Collaboration Champion prize, with Hoare Lea earning commiseratory plaudits for its work on the RNLI slipway lifeboat station at Porthdinllaen.
Having narrowly missed out on Best UK Business Performance for a Large Firm meanwhile, along with the Training Initiative of the Year, which went to Troup Bywaters & Anders, BWB were finally presented with their own award for Technology Champion of the Year, a prize supported by technological advisory Deltek.
Professional services firm Max Fordham meanwhile won Inclusion and Diversity Champion of the Year. Max Fordham has a partnership model similar to that of an ‘employee-owned’ business. For its unique partnership structure, which offers all employees the opportunity to discuss how the business is run after four years of service – leading to increased representation among the firm’s 120 partners.
Commenting on the strategy, Senior Partner Henry Pipe explained, "A few years ago we didn’t think we needed to do anything about diversity. Doing the right thing is at the core of our values. We expected diversity and inclusion to be the natural consequence of employing people who are deeply passionate about it, we were wrong.”
Energy engineering experts Mott MacDonald were named Sustainability Champion of the Year meanwhile, with the firm currently participating in a number of clean-energy projects world-wide.
Individual Awards
The individual award for Apprentice of the Year was presented to Jordan Laraway, of the professional services group Arup, with Ben Freedman of MLM being named the Young Professional of the Year, with further commendation for Tahira Newaz of MWH.
Accompanying his previous triumph, Ben Freedman was also presented with the ceremony’s elite Diamond Award, while the Ambassador Award for top industry representative was presented to Professor Roger Flanagan of Reading University.
On the winners and the awards gala, Dr Nelson Ogunshakin OBE chief executive of ACE said, "This year we had extraordinary projects, companies and individual enter into the Consultancy and Engineering Awards 2017. This year`s winners are true exemplars of what makes our industry great, raising the bar for the rest of the industry."
