How Resolutiion Surfaced Four Critical Delivery Risks at Award and Resolved a Multi-Party EPC Dispute in Six Weeks Without Litigation

• 4 structural risks surfaced at award
• £140k+ value leakage identified
• 6 weeks to resolution
• 6-9 month legal process avoided

The Client

Daniel, Project Director, UK EPC contractor

Daniel’s client had two simple questions: who was responsible? and how quickly can they fix it?

A large UK-based EPC contractor delivering a large smart office complex for a public sector client. Nine subcontract packages spanning physical systems, software and integration platform - each with separately defined deliverables and obligations.

Six months after handover, the client reported multiple faults in the building. Multiple systems failing, from climate control issues to energy consumption skyrocketing and access control software crashing during peak hours.

A complex set of subcontract packages, each with differing terms. Now the building was failing to deliver, they had to determine who was responsible.

The Challenge

Performance failure was not the headline issue, it was an accountability gap in their governance. Each package owned their deliverables, and the EPC contractor remained accountable to the client for overall performance, but responsibility for integration between the subcontract packages had not been clearly allocated within the supply chain. When faults emerged, multiple parties could point to compliant component delivery while no party accepted ownership of system level performance.

• Nine packages, no clause allocating ownership of system-level performance at the point where they connected
• Informal instructions bypassed document control, leaving value unrecoverable at final account
• Notice windows across sequentially dependent packages were untracked, creating time-bar risk across the programme
• Post-handover: climate control failure, energy overconsumption, and access control crashes triggered payment withholding, formal notices, and counterclaims
• Risk exposure in the millions with no structured path to resolution

What began as a technical conversation became a multi-party dispute with a timeline measured in years and costs in the millions.

The Process

Assess

When the prime agreement and all nine subcontract packages were loaded into Resolutiion’s Assess module, four structural risks were surfaced within minutes that had not been caught at award:

• A notice provision cascade across sequentially dependent packages, compressing notice windows down the chain and creating time-bar risk from FEED design through to commissioning.
• No formal change order workflow for scope additions initiated outside document control, the standard operating pattern on the programme, creating undocumented liability each time.
• Risk events across the nine packages were not isolated. Resolutiion mapped how each connected to and compounded obligations elsewhere in the programme, surfacing exposure that no isolated review could have caught.
• Shared risk provisions in the equipment joint venture not flowed down to the relevant construction subcontracts, leaving the programme exposed to cascade delays.

Every one of these conditions was visible in the project data at the point of award. Every one of them contributed to the dispute.

Operate

Two further risk events during delivery had gone undetected at the time:

• An engineering modification had been raised in project controls with no corresponding change order and no budget adjustment in finance. The instruction existed only in MS Teams. The work was completed. The value became unrecoverable at final account. Resolutiion would have flagged the cross-system mismatch the same day, with a retrospective change order still raiseable before the client invoice was issued. The value leakage identified on day one was £140,000 and when it was quantified through existing data points fed from different systems it represented hundreds of thousands of potential risk.
• A subcontractor on the critical path had an invoice outstanding at 78 days, with suspension rights activating at 90. That contractor was on the most commercially sensitive works on the programme, with an open change order negotiation in progress. Resolutiion would have surfaced the clause, the relationship context, and the programme exposure together with 12 days to act.

Resolve

With payment withheld and formal notices issued across multiple packages, Resolutiion’s Resolve module gave the commercial team a complete, timestamped, cross-system audit trail assembled automatically; searchable by package, clause, party, and system of origin.

Using Resolutiion, the team could select two pathways. The first is Facilitative Mediation.

Facilitative Mediation brings both parties together on a shared platform, each in their own secure environment. The platform consolidates the evidence, maps the contractual positions, and aligns the parties around a pragmatic path forwards. This recommended path balances entitlement, risk, cost, and the client’s need for a functioning building, enabling the parties to focus on alignment rather than continued debate over competing interpretations of events.

The second pathway is the Options Analysis capability. Resolutiion consolidates the evidence and enables the evaluation of three structured resolution pathways:

• Option A: Full entitlement position. Contest the interface accountability gap in full based on agreed scope definitions. Strong position on physical delivery.
• Option B: Negotiated cost-share. Accept joint responsibility for the integration testing compression, offset against the software provider’s failure to formally notify the sensor calibration risk within the contractual time-bar.
• Option C: Remediation-first settlement. Agree a jointly funded remediation programme with revised terms introducing interface acceptance criteria, deferring financial settlement until system performance is verified. Fastest path to client satisfaction, with some short-term cost accepted.

The client opted for Facilitative Mediation and a resolution was reached within six weeks. No adjudication. No solicitors. No litigation.

The Result

Had Resolutiion been in place at award, the structural conditions that contributed to the dispute would have been visible before delivery commenced. The four structural risks that caused it were present in the project and governance data from day one.

Resolutiion identified over £140,000 of uninstructed scope leakage and surfaced a critical path suspension risk with 12 days still available to act. Neither had been visible across the disconnected systems in use.

When the dispute had already formed, the commercial team had a complete, cross-system audit trail assembled automatically, rather than weeks of senior resource spent gathering evidence manually across five systems.

Client agreed to a negotiated cost-share in six weeks. The remediation programme was scoped and funded. The prime client got a functioning building.

The Impact

“With Resolutiion, we avoided a 6-9 month legal process by collating everything we already had and articulating it clearly to reach an agreement. Just wish we had it before we reached this point.” — Project Director, EPC Contractor

Findings from a pilot engagement conducted as part of Resolutiion’s innovation partnership programme. Client and project details have been anonymised. Published with permission.