RPC Wrapped 2025
From Awards and Bootcamps to Unifier innovations and Vegas, 2025 at RPC has been almost an entire A–Z of highlights. Look back with us over a monumental year of achievement, activity and a sprinkling of AI.
The highest of the highlights this year has to have been being awarded the Oracle Global Partner of the Year award in the Construction and Engineering Industry Solutions category for our work on the NEC4 configuration for Oracle Primavera Unifier.
This global recognition award is a phenomenal achievement and really pushes us towards our company vision to grow our position as the UK’s Oracle Primavera Partner of choice, leading innovation worldwide in project controls. It really is just the beginning as we continue to focus on further problem-solving, industry-led solutions and configurations in Unifier that deliver cost and time savings to our clients by improving efficiencies and automating workflows. We believe that no-one in the UK is better placed to drive innovations in the use of Unifier than we are and this award brings us into strategic and technical conversations with product development within Oracle at a level we would otherwise not have access to.
Managing Director, John Lister, Technical Director, Dave Hurren and Solutions Director, Nathan Lambert represented RPC at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas in October to attend the awards ceremony and accept our award on behalf of the company. With more than 16,000 attendees, 13,000 customers and partners, more than 1000 in-person sessions over three days, a breakfast hall the size of an aircraft hangar and the actual Def Leppard playing at the after party, the whole event was truly an assault on the senses. The driving focus on AI, insights into what Oracle is developing alongside partners and other industry leaders, the sessions, exhibition hall and keynote presentations have sent our team home fired up with plans for future developments and a vision for RPC’s onward direction of travel and growth. These are exciting times.
Creating and delivering Oracle project controls solutions that empower project teams
Looking back over 2025, we have been very excited to be part of Europe’s largest infrastructure project: Sizewell C, a £42bn project to deliver a new nuclear power station that will provide low-carbon power for 6 million homes, 70,000 jobs across the UK and help to protect against potential energy brownouts by boosting the UK’s power production capabilities.
The Sizewell C project is a major Unifier implementation for us, in which we competed against several well-known large SI organisations and market-leading point solutions and winning this contract was a testament to our capabilities and particularly our contract management expertise. The contract extends across the multiple alliance partners involved in the project, including Balfour Beatty, Bouygues and Laing O’Rourke, reinforcing our strategic position for future contracts with additional alliances on Sizewell C and enhancing the visibility of RPC and our Unifier solutions amongst those alliance members.
Unifier consultancy and implementation continues to be one of the biggest areas of growth in our business, and we closed more Unifier work in August to supply licences including the Unifier NEC4 Contract Management configuration and consultancy to Vinci, a Tier 1 contractor encompassing Eurovia, Vinci, Taylor Woodrow and Ringway Jacobs. This implementation will introduce and strengthen Unifier as a tool within the contracting sector, empowering project teams at all levels on a contract, project, portfolio or whole programme of works to perform efficiently and at the highest standards.
Enabling our clients to build a better future for everyone
We have several long-standing relationships with clients and this year, as for many years, we have continued our long involvement with the MoD. Current projects include working for the Submarine Delivery Agency on delivery of a Unifier solution that will help them to define assumptions used in the planning of major projects across the MoD as well as ongoing work with DE&S supporting Cost and Earned Value projects that are key to maintaining best value for money for the taxpayer in everything they do. The repeat business we get from so many of our clients, not just the MoD, speaks volumes about the quality of work we produce, the calibre of our employees and the high value we place on being nice people to do business with. This is so important to us, and we are gratified by how often this is cited by clients in their decisions to work with us or in feedback to us during projects.
We are also continuing to work with Tata Steel, providing them with Unifier licences, configurations, training and our Hypercare service, all to support the construction of a new electric arc furnace in Port Talbot, South Wales – securing ongoing employment in the region and reducing the carbon output from conventional coal-fired steelworks furnaces.
We spent some time this year reviewing our company mission and purpose and these examples, together with the Sizewell C project mentioned above, exemplify what we identified: that our daily mission is and should be to create and deliver Oracle project controls solutions that empower project teams, working to support a wider purpose of enabling our clients to make the world a better place for everyone. These may seem like lofty statements, but they can be clearly seen in all the work we do, for every single member of the team and through the end results of the work of our clients.
Growing the team to support our vision
Of course, to do this and to continue to grow, we need to expand our team and this year we have welcomed a number of new members of staff. Jethro Large, Louis McLaughlan and Jordan Cartmell have swelled the numbers on our delivery team as Technical Consultants and Jordan as our new Project Delivery Lead. Sam Brown brings added firepower to the Support desk, Emmanuel Dashit is adding much-needed capacity to our training business and Nick Woodrow has joined us as Operations Director as Tina Johnson prepares for retirement.
Whilst we are growing in number, we are growing in capability too, with a drive this year to ensure that all of our delivery team is skilled in more than one core Oracle product. This has meant exposing some of the team to a greater understanding of OPC and running our first Unifier Bootcamp, an intensive few days designed to equip our technical consultants for building Unifier solutions with confidence.
We’ve been delighted to have Harshal Sharma seconded to us for a few months from a fellow Oracle Partner, Prescience Technologies in Australia. Harshal came to Leeds to get immersed in Unifier, learn more about how RPC works and about the NEC4 Unifier configuration we developed. She goes back to Sydney as an honorary RPC team member and a fully-fledged Unifier consultant. Back at Prescience, Harshal will be able to share her knowledge with colleagues to solidify their ability to support NEC4 Unifier deployments in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand and other territories that are logistically beyond our reach.
Knowledge leaders and sharers in the Oracle space
Sharing our expertise through our training business has been core to RPC’s activities since the start and our P6 training grows reliably, year on year. Manny’s arrival has made it possible for us to increase the number of training courses we can deliver each month and it’s clear that his skills and experience will be invaluable to us in keeping our content fresh, broadening our offering and more.
This year, we have refined our ability to create eLearning content to support some of our large Unifier and P6 deployments, offering learner-led, on-demand, bite-sized training and instruction for enterprise clients and we have piloted our P6 Fundamentals course to individual learners with some extremely positive feedback. We’re excited to welcome a new Head of Training Services in the new year to help us to make the most of our capabilities and bring our training to a wider audience. Watch this space …
Conferences offer another valuable opportunity for knowledge sharing and we’ve been as busy as ever this year at events including the Controls and Skills Authority Conference, NEC People Conferences in London, Glasgow and Leeds, Project Connect Group networking events across the country, Project Controls Expo UK in Wembley and more.
The pinnacle for us was the Primavera Project Professionals conference in October, hosted by us with the support of Oracle Construction and Engineering and a select group of Primavera-focused sponsor organisations at the IET Savoy Place in October. With 300 registered delegates and a strong agenda of presentations, it’s clear that there is great enthusiasm for a Primavera focused event of this kind. We were delighted to welcome Joe Castner, Oracle Global VP of Ecosystems to deliver the keynote presentation, Huw Cole, Oracle Master Consultant with some pre-release insights into the latest version of Unifier and a wide range of other presenters on the day. We’re planning already for October 2026!
Vision and enthusiasm for 2026
Whilst we thank our clients for their support this year, none of this would be possible without our fantastic team. Every single employee has played a part in RPC’s success throughout the year – not just the Global Partner of the Year award – and will, as an employee-owned business, share in reaping the rewards. It can be hard to get such a geographically diverse team in one place at any one time but when we achieve that – we had terrific away days this year with Clay Pigeon shooting in Skipton and a hilarious Game Show in Sheffield – it is enormously valuable and a lot of fun.
We’re hoping that our major office renovations, due to complete just in time for Christmas, will introduce more collaborative working space and make it more feasible for staff to spend more time together in the office, where the magic happens. Together with a rebrand earlier in the year, the modern new office environment builds on the momentum of our Oracle award and will carry us all forward into 2026 with a drive and enthusiasm that we know will result in more great things in the future. Join us for the ride.
