Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 56 l f 2 Company Overview WALLS CONSTRUCTION LTD walls.ie Walls Construction Limited (WCL) provides building contracting, design and build, construction management and management contracting services across a wide range of industry sectors including residential, commercial office, data centres, pharmaceutical and life sciences, public sector and hotels and leisure.The business was established by PJ Walls in 1950 and is today recognised as one of Ireland’s leading construction companies,with a reputation for quality and building excellence and customer service. In 2015, the executive team, supported by private investors including members of theWalls family, acquired the company and this investor blend has enabled us to continue to expand the business. Since our foundation over 70 years ago, the company has grown significantly, and it employs a total of almost 400 staff. Author Robert Armstrong Overview & Background to the Lean Initiative Lean Initiative Undertaken – Lean Thinking, Tools, Techniques As part of theWalls IT development strategy and after analysis of the standard on premise software environments used in business, the decision was made to migrate all theWalls IT applications and environments to a completely cloud based, structured, resilient, and protected suite of both in house designed and externally sourced solutions.The objectives were to implement solutions that providedWalls staff with anywhere access to all corporate data and applications, without the cumbersome adoption of typical remote access solutions and provide a total data collaboration environment for all users. Data and communication between staff on all aspects of the business were a pivotal factor in the systems structure going forward and the elimination of servers and all other infrastructural systems needed to facilitate the business and the constant updating of these systems. Future scalability and ease of use were also key factors in the solutions implemented as the company adoption of Office 365 was a key foundation stone for the overall direction we as a business decided to take. In the modern construction process, the importance of data has become pivotal to a project, and the need to both capture and collaborate this data is central to this. As a company, we identified the benefits of cloud technology and had already carried out a full migration from our on-premises SharePoint based document management system to a fully cloud based SharePoint platform. Once we had implemented the cloud-based offering for all project related drawings and data and standardised the structure and security matrix, the next steps taken were to look at our current policies and procedures in all aspects of the construction projects to determine areas where the further use of the technology could be implemented, and additions made where required.This platform, when fully utilised, provided us with better data control, security, versioning, ease of backup and recovery (also cloud based withinAzure Secure Storage) and provided simple scalability as the company demands grew. As part of this initiative,we decided to developMicrosoft PowerApps to facilitate several areas wherein the SharePoint platform could be further utilised such as: a. Development of a custom requisition application to reduce the need for paper requisitions which provided efficiencies in the material procurement process at both the site and procurement department levels.All relevant requisitions and purchase orders are then stored with the specific project subsite in the document management system providing centralisation and ease of access for each construction project.This is a completely SharePoint based solution,which enables us to further customise and develop it as needed. b. Standardisation and development of a custom Site Diary application to standardise the data collection at site level for all projects capturing all required information and images in a simple to use custom form front end.Again, all such data is stored on the subsite for each individual project and is also circulated in a standard PDF format if required.The ease of customisation of this at the backend allows us to constantly evolve this application as needed. c. Implementation of QR codes with connected SharePoint and PowerApps integration for Covid Declarations. A standard form was launched, compatible with any mobile device. When the QR code was scanned the user is guided through a series of questions as part of our Covid 19 requirements. Once completed, the user was then sent a unique QR code. The site-based gatemen and Health, Safety, Environment and Quality (HSEQ) staff could then simply scan any person’s Alan Mullaly Author Case 13 Case Study Title: Walls Construction Cloud Based Solutions Development
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