Peter Jacobs PPCIOB, formerly of Morgan Sindall and Bovis Lend Lease, has been appointed as managing director of construction logistics and integrated solutions at logistics and security company Wilson James.
The appointment comes a year after Jacobs joined Wilson James as a non-executive board director.
Projects that Jacobs will be helping to steer include an appointment as pre-planning consultant to developer Lipton Rogers on 22 Bishopsgate – the building formerly known as The Pinnacle – and its role as logistics integrator at Heathrow’s £1.5bn ongoing expansion.
Jacobs brings expertise from his role at Morgan Sindall, where he was managing director of the London and airports division.
Jacobs told Construction Manager that the role of logistics consultant for the planning application at 22 Bishopsgate was “exciting”.
"If Amazon can deliver your groceries in a quarter of an hour slot, then we should be able to do the same with thousands of pounds worth of cladding."
Peter Jacobs
Wilson James is currently discussing the project with Brookfield Multiplex, which has won the role of pre-construction adviser, although Jacobs stressed that it has not been appointed on the construction phase to date.
Jacobs said: “There’s so much construction work around that area – if you walk up Bishopsgate and London Wall there’s about £2.5bn of construction in the next two years, so it’s a massive logistics exercise.
“With such tight constraints on [deliveries to] the site you really couldn’t do it without a consolidated logistics centre.”
He said that the solutions adopted were likely to include out-of-hours deliveries, planning drviers’ routes around London to avoid bottlenecks and accident risk sites, and the use of GPS and fleet logistics software.
On adopting digital tracking technologies, he said: “If Amazon can deliver your groceries in a quarter of an hour slot, then we should be able to do the same with thousands of pounds worth of cladding. The front end of construction is going digital with BIM and offsite fabrication, and now we’ve got to make sure the back end does too.”
Jacobs previously spent 24 years at Bovis Lend Lease, where he was a director for 10 years and headed up the team behind the London 2012 Athletes’ Village.
