The construction company deployed digital construction tools to deliver woodland cabins for the leisure park operator.
In late 2017 John Sisk & Son (Sisk) was awarded the contract to build the guest lodges and central leisure buildings at the hotly anticipated €233m Center Parcs at Longford Forest near Ballymahon in Ireland. It would accommodate up to 2,500 guests in nearly 470 lodges, distributed across 160ha of beautiful woodland.
With 466 individual lodges to build across a vast site over 68 weeks, Sisk knew that to sustain the pace of work it would be paramount to keep abreast of progress and deploy resources effectively.
Powerproject from Elecosoft is Sisk’s choice of planning software and on this project, Sisk chose to trial Site Progress Mobile, which is Powerproject’s companion mobile app, with the hope that it would help it to keep a closer eye on activities, resources and progress across this large area.
Project leader Cormac Fitzpatrick and lead planner Damien Gallagher found Site Progress Mobile helped them to successfully manage progress on the Center Parcs build.
Sisk’s project to build the central leisure buildings (above) and guest lodges (top) was speeded by use of Elecosoft’s Site Progress Mobile
The time savings were quick to compound. Before receiving live progress updates from the site through the app, Gallagher estimated it would take a full day each week to simply update the project programme. The impact after starting to use the app was quite clear.
He says: “Carrying out the same activity in terms of progressing the bar chart was reduced considerably to about three hours instead of a full day. As soon as app users have completed updates at site level via the app, progress data goes up into the cloud and is available for the planner to download and review and check the information, before integrating it into the overall progress update.”
“Tools like the Site Progress Mobile app help us to take people out from behind desks, marking up progress on drawings or schedules, to instead managing the work on site.”
Damien Gallagher, John Sisk & Sons
Users on site also benefited from time efficiencies, as Fitzpatrick adds: “To gather all the mark-ups and progress updates ready to give to the planner would have taken those field users a full day of exercise each – now with the app they can continuously gather and update information as they go. There is really no additional task involved in delivering progress.”
The project finished on time and to everyone’s satisfaction, and the centre opened in July 2019, receiving rave online reviews. Having proved the value of Site Progress Mobile, Sisk quickly purchased a number of licences for use across the company and it has been put to use on several further projects.
Fitzpatrick reflects on how apps like this are benefiting planners: “One of the benefits of new technologies coming on stream so far is that correct information is now fed out and reaches sites.
“The Site Progress Mobile app is probably the first example I have seen where we are also getting correct and timely information back from the site itself. It means that the planner gets real visibility and can, instead of spending time inputting information, assess incoming information, query it, validate it, then have time to think and make the right decisions around it.”
Elecosoft is a CIOB partner
