The award-winning Galway builder O’Malley Construction lives up to its website description of “forward looking” with a commitment to quality and client satisfaction for its projects that is underpinned by investment in smart technology. It has been awarded both the Homebond Premier and New Homes Awards, short listed for the Building Excellence awards on several occasions and won the Construction Euro Safety Award in 1993 for its work on the Jury’s Inn project.
Operation range
O’Malleys operates across all categories of building and development, including houses and multi-unit residential, retailing, industrial, hospitality and many others. It offers a full range of contract options covering every aspect of project planning and site management from outline feasibility study to final commissioning and hand over. In common with other builders, it is increasingly finding that clients opt for ‘Design and Build’, often with the financing involved also. The company has a permanent staff of around 50 and tends to have about 150 on its payroll at any one time. It currently has five sites in operation, three in Co. Galway and two in Dublin including Bloomfield, Donnybrook and its largest single project, a 500-plus apartment complex in Dundrum.
“In many respects the management of those remote sites is our biggest single challenge in IT terms,” explained Rob Mooney, the O’Malleys general manager whose remit covers the day-to-day operation of the company’s systems.
“But in fact it has been working very well for the last year or so. We have succeeded in setting up broadband connections at all of the sites, some wireless where ADSL was not available. So linking them back to head office here in Galway by internet VPN has been working fine.” O’Malley Construction has just over 30 PCs in its operation overall, with 20 at head office and the balance in the site offices with a half dozen laptops used by the senior project managers and engineers who travel regularly between the project locations.
Server four
There are four Dell Poweredge servers, with one each dedicated to accounts and document scanning and general purpose servers in Galway and the Bloomfield site in Dublin. Total company data is now over 9oGb, with each site holding around 10Gb locally. Smaller projects have a project duration of about a year but some of the current major ones will have site offices in operation for perhaps four years, amassing data all the time.
“The sheer volume of paperwork that building projects still generate is enormous, between delivery dockets, invoices and so on. We invested in the Adest document scanning and management system about a year ago. After a few small teething problems, it’s fair to say that we have never looked back.” Rob Mooney explained that scanned documents go directly to the relevant project files and accounts administration. They are individually bar-coded for retrieval as and when required.
The company has now started to scan subcontractors’ dockets, payment certificates and so on at site level. “This gives us much more visibility of what’s going on. There are also some projects which are joint ventures, so we have been able to set up the systems so that our partners can view and verify anything they wish. They can see but not modify.”
Standard templates
“One of the simplest yet most valuable things we have done in IT is to set up a standard file structure template, so that every project is organised and managed in the same way. That means, for example, that senior managers and especially the project managers can readily access the information they need for any specific project.”
It also facilitates the management on-site. The Galway IT consultancy Netfocus set up the on-site systems and the remote VPN connections using Sonicwall appliances with in-built firewalls. Its managing director John Logan explained that each site has immediate access to its own working files, with a version control system in place at head office. “It synchronises and replicates all file changes. That ensures people are always working with the latest official version of drawings and so on. This is based on a wide area file system which also coordinates the file access control at head office level. Since the file folder hierarchy is the same for every project, it all goes to make it easy for project managers on the road to access top level information and in fact to work on project A while on site B as it were.”
The way Rob Mooney and his senior colleagues see it, the head office is more in control of all operations yet at the same time the individual sites are technologically empowered. “It would be hard to over-stress the value we have gained from having all of our information consistently and methodically retained and presented. There is effectively a master template for every aspect of the way we manage our business processes and our projects.”
Smart investment
While project and cost control is the main objective of O’Malleys, like all construction companies, there are management information bonuses in their current set of systems. For example, because project records are consistent, it is quite easy to do comparative analysis of, for example, a sub-contractors’ actual costs or to compare the performance of different contractors in specific areas like electrical and plumbing services.
“We are still a relatively small, family company based in the west of Ireland,” Rob Mooney sums up the company’s philosophy, “But we are competing on quality and performance in a tough market. So investment in smart systems is clearly what enables us to punch above our weight and to win and manage major contracts anywhere in Ireland.”
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