The Woodhouse Partnership joins RSK Group

Founded in 1994 by a group of former senior managers from Shell, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the Royal Air Force, Philips, and Kvaerner Engineering, TWPL now operates in more than 30 countries from offices in the UK, the USA, Colombia and Brazil.

The company boasts an unrivalled team of asset management experts and trainers, with multi-sector personal experience in developing and implementing leading practices for asset and risk management. This includes award-winning processes, guidance, tools and training for value-optimised, and life-cycle sustainable, management of physical assets and infrastructure.

Typical projects include the assessment of current capabilities, the development of value-prioritised roadmaps for improvement and practical support during the implementation of critical, complex change programmes (including training, process changes, cultural and technical solutions and embedding). TWPL is currently introducing optimised capital investment planning (processes, skills and leading-edge decision support tools) across 25 subsidiary companies of a multinational petrochemicals and manufacturing group.

Another current project, for a large gas distribution network, includes establishing an asset management competency framework, with a full spectrum of professional development programmes, bespoke blended learning, a professional qualifications scheme and overall, corporate maturity assessments.

Recent and current clients include HOFOR (City of Copenhagen multi-utilities), UK National Grid, Ecopetrol (Colombia), SABIC, Babcock International (defence), Affinity Water, United States Bureau of Reclamation and Transport for London (TfL).

TWPL Chief Executive Officer John Woodhouse was presented with the Institute of Asset Management (IAM) President’s Award in 2018 for more than 20 years of exceptional service to the institute and to the professional discipline. John and his colleagues have also authored many of the definitive standards (e.g., BSI PAS 55 and ISO 55000), guidance material and books on strategic asset management. These include:

• Managing Industrial Risk: Getting Value for Money in Your Business, Chapman & Hall, 1993
• ‘Asset Management Competency Requirements Framework, 1st Version’, IAM, 2006
• ‘ISO 55000 – what, why and how’, 2014
• Asset Management Decision-making: The SALVO Process, TWPL, 2014
• ‘Developing and Maintaining a Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP)’, IAM, 2017
• ‘The Pathway to Excellence in Asset Management’, IAM, 2021.

John, who will continue to lead the business, recognises the synergies offered by joining the RSK Group: “Most of our business comes from reputation and word-of-mouth recommendations between major multinational clients. But these successes create a challenge in coping with the rapidly growing demand. The RSK Group shares our values and offers us the scaling opportunities, with over 12,000 professionals and a wide range of complementary capabilities.”

Welcoming the Woodhouse team into the RSK Group, Chief Executive Officer Alan Ryder said: “The Woodhouse Partnership boasts one of the highest concentrations and longest established sources of asset management expertise available worldwide. RSK is proud to have added this wealth of experience and knowledge to the group that will benefit all our clients.

“TWPL also offers a fully developed and proven suite of software tools and methodologies for optimised decision-making and investment planning in all aspects of asset management. Such capabilities are, of course, rapidly becoming recognised as essential for major transformation and digitalisation projects in all industry sectors.”

As RSK continues to deliver its ambitious growth strategy, it now comprises around 180 companies, employing 12,000 people. The group’s annual turnover at the end of FY22 was £796 million.

The acquisition advisers were Sue Green and Tim Harrington at Watersheds.