Rich Sanderson is Regional Operations Director for IPS in Pennsylvania. Rich brings extensive EPCM experience and almost three decades in construction management in the UK and US, including 25 years in US life sciences. For the past 8 years with IPS he has served as an Operations Director leading large, complex EPCM projects and teams for major clients including Merck and GSK. He is recognized for his ability to elevate team performance through Lean practices, collaboration and align stakeholders to deliver outcomes.

Richard Sanderson

Richard Sanderson, IPS, discusses pharma capital project cost pressures, bloated deliverable lists, and making the case for EPCM's end-to-end delivery model.

Richard Sanderson on EPCM vs. Construction Firms

Richard Sanderson, vice president in the Project Business Services group, IPS, sat down with 

 on deploying lean, sustainable, and tech-enabled delivery platforms on large engineering, procurement and construction management

EPCM) projects. In this part 1 of a two-part interview, he reflects on the evolving pressures facing pharmaceutical capital project teams and how IPS is responding. 

Sanderson identifies cost reduction as the defining trend shaping the industry. Large branded pharma clients are increasingly looking to CDMO and CMO organizations for inspiration, seeking to adopt their leaner ways of working. Beyond operational changes, procurement groups are playing a more active role, exploring alternative contracting models, including limited agency agreements, and in some cases choosing to hold contracts directly rather than through an EPCM partner to eliminate associated fees.

Sanderson highlights the issue of bloated deliverable libraries. "Over a period of time, [pharma clients] have built up a large library of deliverables that they expect during the engineering phase, and quite frankly, the extent of some of these lists of deliverables is really, really large and not fit for purpose," he says, adding that IPS must engage clients early to right-size these expectations and arrive at a leaner, more practical set of requirements.

On the merits of the EPCM model itself, Sanderson is confident in its advantages, particularly the ability to overlap design, construction, and compliance phases to compress timelines. However, he acknowledges a persistent perception problem. "Some clients don't view the EPCM firms like IPS as real builders," he notes, adding that while IPS has strong construction capabilities, the company must work harder at the proposal stage to prove it can deliver the full end-to-end scope as effectively as dedicated construction management firms.

Richard Sanderson

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