RPC 2023 – A year of exciting new ventures

As 2023 draws to a close, we’re looking back over a year of momentous milestones at RPC, from start to finish. Join us in reviewing some of the highlights of the past 12 months.

The year began with an exciting new start for the company: tying up the legal procedures involved in transitioning the company ownership to an Employee Owned Trust. With a number of major stakeholders retiring or planning to retire within the next few years, the board had been discussing options for the future. Acquisition and Management Buy-Out were all considered, but the idea of becoming Employee-Owned – like John Lewis, Aardman Animations, Arup, Mott MacDonald and many more – immediately felt like the right fit for RPC, where we pride ourselves on empowering our employees and supporting them to make decisions that are right for the company and for their own personal growth. We announced the transition in February and are now extremely proud to say that RPC is 100% Employee-Owned. Find out more about what this means for us – and for our customers – and how employee ownership works here.

One of the drivers in this change of ownership structure was the imminent retirement of Managing Director, Keith Hogben. Keith left us in June, after many years at the helm at RPC, to spend more time in his woodworking workshop. For a small company like RPC, the departure of such a key member of the team can be destabilising and for many of our colleagues and clients, Keith was the face of RPC, but he’d been working for some time to bring Projects Director John Lister into the role and we’re delighted to say that the company never even missed a beat in the smooth handover from one to the other. 

John has been with RPC since 2017, but has been a familiar face in Oracle Primavera circles for many years before that, having first used Primavera P3 in 1995. The employee ownership transition was John’s brainchild and he’s passionate about nurturing the RPC team as the business continues to grow. Read more here about John’s professional background and vision for the future. Wanting no fuss, we gathered to mark Keith’s retirement at our annual company Summer-not-Christmas team social. With no speeches on the night, we want him to know now how much we value everything he put into RPC over many years, and that we miss him! 

A really significant area of growth and development for us this year has been our Unifier-based Solution Sets: pre-built solutions that enable us to expedite the deployment of previously complex project controls solutions in a number of common business areas. We’ve been working with Oracle this year to explore the possibility of forging an agreement to share the rights to sell our NEC4 Contract Management Solution as an official Oracle product and we’re extremely excited to have finalised that deal as the year comes to a close. This will allow customers to buy an integrated NEC4 solution developed with Oracle, built on Oracle infrastructure and purchased directly from Oracle – wherever they are in the world. It’s a ground-breaking agreement for both RPC and Oracle and we hope just the first of many similar joint ventures. It’s big news for RPC.

Back at base, 2023 has been a record-breaking year for our Training team, with more than 1000 delegates from over 80 different companies successfully completing our popular Oracle Primavera P6 courses. Our courses are delivered in-person either at client sites or in our Leeds classroom, and online via Teams in equal measure. This year has seen our trainers with clients on-site from Plymouth to Glasgow and the length of the country in between (plus Finland!). Online, we’ve reached as far as Iraq, Canada and the US and as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve been busy developing eLearning courseware for enterprise clients and to launch as our own RPC Learn service in the new year. Training continues to go from strength to strength and we love meeting so many project controls professionals as they join our courses and in supporting them in their professional development.

As always, we’ve enjoyed getting out and about sharing our expertise and learning from others at conferences and industry events around the UK and beyond. Events such as Steve Wake’s EVA conferences, the NEC People conferences and Project Controls Expo are a great opportunity to meet and talk with other members of the project controls community and a chance to discuss our products and solutions, the problems they solve and the pain points customers have that we might also be able to address. This year we took our Earned Value solution on a roadshow to the US, where Technical Director Dave Hurren presented at Project Controls Expo USA in Washington DC. He was also extremely proud and excited to be invited to speak at the Fall 2023meeting of the NDIA (National Defense Industrial Association) Integrated Program Management Division at Oracle’s Redwood City base in California. This was a phenomenal opportunity to share our work with a large room packed full of Earned Value professionals within military, government and industry sectors in America, all gathered together to discuss program performance management methodologies and how to improve them. 

With such a busy year and a continuing period of growth, we’ve welcomed some new members to the RPC family. Carl Mitchell joined us at the very beginning of the year and it seems as though he’s been with us for ever. He is working alongside Tina and Natalie in the office and supporting the licence and hosting sales processes and has quickly become a really key member of the office team. 

In August we were delighted to welcome Paul de Cort. Paul joins us with a wealth of project controls experience and an enviable depth of expertise in all things Primavera P6. As Senior Consultant, he will be working with our many P6 and OPC customers to ensure they are getting best value out of their Oracle investments at all times. 

To help us to meet our ever-expanding demands for training, Lorna Wenman has come on board as Training Consultant, working on delivering bespoke training solutions for our clients and helping to build our eLearning offering.

At the beginning of November, we added two more to our number, with James McGowan and Matt Barnard. James joins the Technical Office where he will be working with the Support team and assisting our other James, James Bentley, on integration works with clients.

Matt has long-standing links with RPC and within the project controls community, and more than ten years’ experience in Enterprise SaaS Software Sales, Channel Sales Development and Partnership Management. He comes on board as Business Development Director, where he will be working alongside Chris Woodbridge to support us in growing our business and building relationships with partners and clients, particularly in the area of Unifier solutions.

We’ve had snow in Yorkshire this week, but cast your minds back to the summer and a hot, sticky Saturday in June, when a team of an impressive two thirds of the entire employee base took on the Macmillan Lake District Mighty Hike – a marathon length and challenging walk around Ullswater. When we stopped for our many and frequent breathers, it’s fair to say that the views were spectacular. Many of our friends, family, colleagues and clients generously donated to our fundraising efforts and we are very proud to have raised a collective £6,579.13 for a very good cause. You can look back on the highs and some of the lows of the event including our Chairman’s legendary tumble, and find out more about how Macmillan uses the money we raised here.

To finish the year we are supporting a more local charity, Homeless Hampers, with donations raised from our Christmas Jumper Day. Homeless Hampers work in the Leeds and Bradford area supporting shelters with food and providing essential supplies, such as toiletries, together with advice and support through weekly outreaches in Leeds. They do incredibly important work and sadly are needed more than ever.

All of us at RPC would like to thank our colleagues, clients, friends and associates for their custom and support throughout the year and wish everyone a happy, healthy and successful 2024.