The challenge
Northern Infrastructure Group was eight months into an £18 million highway bypass project when subcontractor performance issues and unusually wet weather combined to delay completion by an estimated seven weeks. The client (a regional authority) initially refused to grant any extension of time, arguing that the contractor had not provided contemporaneous evidence of the cause and impact of the delay.
The contractor faced a difficult choice. Engage a forensic delay analyst at £150 per hour to reconstruct the chronology from eight months of emails, programme revisions, and meeting minutes (estimated cost £85,000 to £120,000), or accept the client's position and absorb the cost.
A third option emerged: their planner had been recording weekly snapshots in No Slip since the project began. Every week showed variance, slippage cause, and recoverability assessment. The audit trail confirmed who recorded what and when.
The solution
Northern Infrastructure Group activated the No Slip Forensic Analysis module in May 2025. For £2,500 the module generated three documents from the existing snapshot history.
A delay chronology covering every week of the project from start to claim date, showing variance, RAG status, slippage cause, and recoverability flag at each point in time.
A cause attribution summary breaking down total delay days by category. The output showed that 34 of the 47 claimed delay days were attributed to subcontractor performance recorded contemporaneously, with 9 attributed to weather and 4 to design changes outside contractor control.
A critical path impact statement quantifying the cumulative effect against the original baseline completion date.
The contractor's legal team used these documents alongside their own correspondence to present the EOT claim in adjudication. The adjudicator accepted the No Slip output as primary evidence of contemporaneous recording. The 47-day extension was granted in full.
Outcomes
- 47-day extension of time granted in adjudication
- £2,500 spent on No Slip forensic module vs estimated £85,000 to £120,000 for traditional delay analyst engagement
- Adjudicator specifically referenced the contemporaneous timestamping of the snapshot records as decisive
- Net saving to the contractor: approximately £85,000 in expert fees, plus avoided liquidated damages on the disputed 47 days
- Adopted No Slip across two further projects following this outcome
“We had eight months of records nobody could argue with. The forensic module turned that record into a claim document for £2,500. Without No Slip we would have spent £85,000 to produce a weaker case retrospectively.”