Present Group puts it all together

There's certainly no shortage of ambition at Present Group, which has the lofty goal of becoming the world's first global 'completions enterprise'.

Present Group's business is helping clients such as Woodside, Santos, Origin, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata build and commission renewable energy plants, power stations, desalination plants, refineries, mines, ports and rail projects.

Present Group is made up of four businesses: Octave Consulting, which provides advice and effective governance of projects; Seamless Resourcing, which assists with commissioning, audit or hazard assessment; Powertech Services, which offers technical engineering specialties; and Precise Facilities, which provides test and measurement services.

The group also has plans to launch a fifth business, Onexus Systems, to provide e-commerce services.

In July 2010, Present Group evolved from Powertech, a decade-old engineering services and plant-commissioning company that had experienced rapid growth and profits, until being hit hard by the GFC.

Reduced productivity and million dollar losses, combined with plans in development to move into process innovation, led the company to drastically alter its business.

Powertech's management could see an opportunity to prosper and expand, but was wary of becoming top heavy as a larger business; so it adopted a new strategy to become a completions enterprise and expanded its service offerings to include four businesses.

Present Group redesigned its company to be a social system first and a business second by setting itself up as a meritocracy and encouraging staff to trust the value each individual brought to the business.

Present Group thereby provided its staff with autonomy – allowing each aspect of the business to operate independently while contributing to the whole.

Managing director Brian Grimmer describes the business as a "social venture".

"Chronic waste abounds not only in the resource sense but also as the waste of life purpose," he said.

"Again and again on projects we have witnessed both people and project serving the system rather than the system serving the greater good. This results in massive waste, low morale and cost and time overruns.

"With our unique culture and capability of process innovation we truly believe that we can remedy this to the benefits of our customers and society at large."

Motivated by its global business aspirations, Present Group has in two years launched the four new businesses that provide its individual services, opened six offices, brought in enterprise resource planning to integrate all information management, and started using the cloud.

Present Group's 248 employees, up from 55 in 2009, work from the company headquarters in Perth and offices in Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales, Cebu (in the Philippines), and Singapore.