Over the past decade there’s been something of a boom in the construction industry. Gleaming edifices such as those located in Dublin’s Irish Financial Services Centre offer proof that we’re living in a modern era. However, while these new buildings may show how forward looking we are, the equipment used to construct them is often verging on the prehistoric!
Given this, you’d expect the building industry to be somewhat reluctant to invest in technology. After all, there are obvious benefits in purchasing pickaxes and shovels, but not so when investing in state-of-the-art IT systems. Increasingly though, this view is changing because firms working in the sector are coming to
realise that while the tools of trade may not be reliant on technology, it can still help in other ways.
Information flow
Take collaboration for example. With so many contractors employed on an individual project and changes being made on a constant basis, the most essential process in the trade is information flow. Yet, managing this flow is often incredibly difficult especially on large scale developments that may involve hundreds of people, all of whom are working on different activities.
One organisation to wise up to the benefits of implementing IT in the building sector is Rogerson Reddan and Associates, a firm of project, construction and cost managers based in Dublin and Limerick.
The company, which has its head office at Haddington Road, Dublin 4, has recently installed a new system that has enabled it to communicate and collaborate more effectively with people working onsite. Because the company generally works on projects that last a year or more, it has proven useful for the firm to have full IT systems setup on-site. However, in the past this has proved problematic.
These days, though, thanks to a little help from the technology provider IT Focus, the firm has a Windows 2003 Small Business Server running Exchange server and project management software at its head office. In addition to this, the firm has set up Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) with its office in Limerick and onsite to a construction site in Foley Street in the centre of Dublin. The benefit of these VPNs is that there only needs to be one central network running all components of the operation, including e-mail and project management software. Moreover, if a new construction project is taken on, all the firm needs do is configure another VPN tunnel to have its IT infrastructure open to employees at the new site.
‘The Virtual Private Network is brilliant because it means that people that aren’t based in our head office are still effectively on our network and have e-mail, access to file servers, etc,’ says Seamus Reddan, managing director with the organisation. ‘Initially we weren’t aware we could set up such a network. It was only when we realised that we need to upgrade our servers that we began to find
out what we could do.’
High-speed access
In addition to installing the VPNs, the firm also set about ensuring that it had a broadband connection at all of its sites. Prior to this the company had been able to use the Internet via dial-up access in its cabins while onsite and had also been able to back up data locally as well. However, while this was better than nothing it wasn’t totally satisfactory. Now though, the firm not only has high-speed Internet access at all its locations but it can also work closer via access to a specialist website known as Buzzsaw — a collaborative online project service for teams in the building industry. The service enables users to manage multiple building, manufacturing and/or infrastructure projects through planning, design, construction and operation. ‘Buzzsaw is particularly useful for us’, says Reddan.
‘It’s essentially a piece of diskspace on the Web with collaborative software which can manage change control. So for example, if there’s a change order generated online instead of creating it on forms and faxing it out to various people as we’ve traditionally done we can just post it on the website and it will automatically notify those concerned that changes have been made.’
Learning curve
Reddan admits that adopting the new system has been a learning curve for the firm but he believes that it has paid dividends and perhaps more importantly, it has led the firm to think about how they can expand their use of technology.
‘The level of success we’ve had, particularly using Buzzsaw, has been educational,’ he says. ‘Maybe our next step is that we would have the infrastructure ourselves and become the hose for the information so that everyone would come to our servers rather than to an outsourced service online. The ideal scenario for us is the collaboration that would go on between a design team. We have architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, project managers and constructors all working as one.’
Reddan is looking to future. ‘If we could set up a common repository for all the project information then this would serve everyone better. Typically in the industry, each consultant has their own servers and archives and nobody else can access these. However, there’s a revolution happening in the construction industry, albeit a slow one — there’s going to be a future where the barriers come down and you have common repositories that will make collaboration that much easier.’
17/01/04
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