BES Ltd creates cutting-edge cleanrooms, laboratories and other sophisticated facilities for the pharmaceutical, life sciences, healthcare and other hi-tech industrial sectors, developing bespoke solutions to meet each client’s project-specific requirements. Its fully integrated service combines design, digital innovation and construction capabilities to provide a complete multidisciplinary offering. CEO Zeb Ahmed explained more to Hannah Barnett.
ASboth a design and construction company, BES has plenty to offer its clients.
“We pride ourselves on providing fast track, high value-added solutions that support the low carbon economy and meet stringent regulatory requirements for the industries we operate in,” said Zeb Ahmed, CEO. “We deliver projects in a highly innovative manner because we can influence both the design initially and
then implement modern methods of construction or hybrid methodologies.”
The company, based in Rochdale, was founded in 2002 and has grown to a team of more than 150 professionals. A key milestone was reached in 2021, when BES recorded a £100 million turnover. “We have seen a period of rapid growth and had a lot of success, becoming a leading brand in the sector we operate in,” Mr Ahmed reflected. “Reaching the milestone turnover two years ago was a high point, because within a 20-year span that’s quite impressive.”
BES remains highly profitable, with a turnover of approximately £60 million for 2023, due to its low-overhead structure and lean project delivery methods. In a competitive marketplace, the company offers sustainable bespoke solutions, with
products and services that are agile, value added, optimised and tailored precisely to our client’s needs.”
The full package BES offers turnkey lifecycle project solutions including front-end consultancy, detailed design, construction, commissioning, and validation, with an in-house team of 50 multidisciplinary design consultants.
“We take extreme pride in exceeding our client’s expectations, not only with demonstrating competitiveness of the project capital costs,” said Mr Ahmed: “we focus on the project and asset lifecycle costs to ensure our clients receive best value over the lifespan of the facility operation.”
As BES operates in high tech research, development and manufacturing sectors,
the company designs and builds within the context of highly stringent regulations, where the lifecycle of a building is typically around 20 to 40 years.
“Most of our competitors still focus on ensuring that a pharmaceutical facility satisfies product regulations, and that is it,” said Mr Ahmed. “We have added to that a low-carbon sustainability agenda. We have a unique business model, which we use to benefit our clients in terms of the overall lifecycle value to them, which now includes the ability to deliver low-carbon solutions.”
The value of modular
In 2017, BES acquired Norwood, a leading partition manufacturer, also located in the UK north-west, with an impressive portfolio of cleanroom modular systems.
The acquisition provided complementary faculties and gave BES control over a key part of its supply chain, ensuring installations are delivered to the highest standard while providing best value for money to clients.
“Norwood provides the internal panels, or the cleanroom fit out, for our projects,” Mr Ahmed explained. “The panels are constructed with steel, which is recyclable and reusable, and some of the coatings on other products are made from very environmentally efficient materials such as rapeseed oil.”
The company can also construct modular systems in-house. This means where traditionally materials are designed to be
assembled on site, parts can be prefabricated and made in the factory, significantly reducing carbon emissions.
“We also have prefabrication facilities within the group that deliver process, mechanical and electrical systems,” Mr Ahmed added. “This means when we do a project, we can prefabricate a large portion of what we’ve designed and install it, significantly reducing the overall carbon footprint. So, we have a strong internal capability to deliver sustainable, low-carbon projects.”
Shaping the future
It is no surprise that the BES portfolio is made up of many technically challenging complex projects, with some of the world’s leading
research, development, and manufacturing organisations. This includes state-of-the-art facilities for AstraZeneca, GSK, Pfizer, Recipharm and Johnson and Johnson to name but a few: BES has been providing facilities with products that deliver life saving and life changing products and technologies. The company also played a part in the building the national vaccine manufacturing facility during the Covid pandemic, a noteworthy challenge. “This project required very fast delivery of the actual facilities,” said Mr Ahmed. “So, we incorporated a significant element of prefabrication including modular process plant skids, energy centre equipment and the cleanroom and laboratory fit-out panelling systems. With this prefabricated modular approach and other sustainable technology selection, we can reduce carbon intensity by around 20 to 40 per cent compared with published figures for traditional building methods.”
BES is also currently working on a project for a confidential client with a capital value of over of over £80 million. As part of the site master planning, BES suggested a more flexible sustainable solution supporting the circular economy model, which can be scaled up or down to meet a range of operating scenarios and product forecasts.
“Typically, the high-tech industries require basic buildings, industrial in nature, more like a factory; so we give them various options, from designing out materials, designing out waste and designing for flexibility, longevity and disassembly for reuse and recycling at the end of life,” explained Mr Ahmed. “For example, with regards to designing our materials, structural steel is a higher density material compared to
concrete, requiring less material to deliver the same structural integrity.”
Though the low-carbon solutions can be perceived to be more expensive from a capital cost perspective, they can offer a more sustainable lifecycle cost from a whole life carbon perspective, which, according to Mr Ahmed, is something BES’s clients are becoming ever more receptive to: “They’re more willing to consider the big question on the circular economy about how much it costs to both build – and more importantly operate, something over the facility or asset lifecycle and reuse. I think for the first time, the whole industry and supply chain are becoming aligned, to try and really deliver change, challenging and moving away from the linear economic model of take, make, use and dispose.”
The company is now reaping the benefits of the loyal relationships it has cultivated with its own supply chain, with some supplier partnerships stretching back 20 years.
“We work with a range of suppliers,” said Mr Ahmed. “It means we can incorporate open innovation and develop collaborative sustainable solutions. If they want to work with us, then they must be thinking about the concept of sustainability in their operations as well. It is through the adoption of the principles of Whole Life Carbon Assessment that we are trying to create tangible measures and carbon intensity performance benchmarks for warehouse, science and technology buildings: and we have evidence from clients that they are now looking at the benefits of doing the same.”
Indeed, it is this potential for, and focus on, innovation that drives BES, and the people who run it.
“What inspires me, as an engineer, is the potential to influence what happens in the industry and being part of the thought leadership, heralding change and transformation,” Mr Ahmed concluded. “That really supports the company’s vision of being the leader in the marketplace, by providing these regulatory-compliant, high value-added sustainable solutions.
“We are unique in our capabilities, and we have the opportunity to actually design, implement and evaluate these strategies and the solutions that we profess are the right ones. So, the journey ahead is extremely exciting.” n
