Fueling Business Growth With Conack Construction

The Challenge

Conack is a dynamic and ambitious firm continuously setting new standards to deliver state-of-the-art building and infrastructure solutions throughout the country. They are involved with numerous large construction projects across Ireland, including Dublin’s ambitious Cherrywood development and Stryker’s Cork expansion. Their contemporary approach and design influence has given rise to repeat business.

Communication, information, and collaboration are critical for Conack, with the need for a single platform from which teams can manage all of these projects. Integration with other tools is crucial, as is the need for any platform to act as a data repository for project documentation and communication.

The Solution

As Conack’s growth continued to accelerate, it needed a unified construction management platform that would integrate with these tools, providing a single destination to store information and aid collaboration. 

Brid Mullane, CDE Administrative Manager at Conack Construction, explains, "We have set strategies in terms of how we communicate with design team members, how we upload projects, how we manage and deliver information, and there are several areas that Procore immediately impacts and improves."

"The real beauty of Procore is that we don’t have to log into several apps or different solutions," says Mullane. "You click Procore, and you have access to drawings, to models, you can view what’s going on at any one of the sites, and it’s all on one platform."

The Story

It’s fair to say that Conack has a large amount on its plate these days. The company is currently juggling more than 20 major construction projects around Ireland, including Dublin’s prestigious Cherrywood development, and restricted site access over the past year due to COVID-19 has made things more challenging.

The Conack team are more than up to the challenge and using Procore as a single platform to manage apps, documents, and communication. This forward-thinking approach and commitment to project excellence were amongst the factors in Conack being invited onto the second phase of the Cherrywood project.

"We’ve been using Procore as a common data environment at Conack," says Mullane, "allowing us to store all the information we’re working on in one unified platform. Procore has improved the way we manage, share and record documents, and the ability to access information at the drop of a hat has made a big difference for us."

"Procore is easy to use with very logical workflows, which means that we can be confident of the information that we are getting from our site teams. Procore’s easy tracking of RFIs and submittals also means that we spend less time chasing responses and design reviews, and more time on the actual build. Time is one of the most valuable resources on any project, and because Procore is so easy to use, everybody benefits."

Integration with Evercam

While COVID-19 has created challenges with site accessibility, Procore’s integration with Evercam has made an enormous difference for Conack, enabling managers to stay connected across all activities, even when working from different locations. 

"Evercam provides the ability to view what’s happening on your site in real-time," Mullane explains. "You can position cameras in multiple places, and the more you lean on Evercam, the more you can track what’s coming and going on-site, such as the number of trucks or deliveries. We’re moving vast amounts of dirt during large projects, for example, and keeping track of that makes it a lot easier to make calculations."

"It’s genuinely useful to see what’s happening on a project in real-time," she added. "If there’s a big concrete pour going on in our Cherrywood project, Kevin Nolan, our quantity surveyor, or several other people on the project can log into Procore and use Evercam to see the pour happening on-site. It’s great for project management, it’s good for security, and it’s also instrumental if there’s ever an accident. You can take thousands of photographs, but you can’t beat being able to log in and have a look at what’s going on."

Connecting field teams with Procore BIM

"The ease with which we’ve been able to integrate Procore’s BIM viewer into our projects has been fabulous. It’s so easy-to-use," says Mullane. "We’ve been able to connect our site teams back to Procore to a far greater extent than just looking at a drawing—people working on-site can look at a 3D model, and they can review clashes in the model through the platform as well."

"Procore BIM means that we can put BIM in the hands of our teams on-site, rather than them having to go back to the kabin to check and reference designs. As we go on our BIM journey at Conack, having that ability to do real-time clash detection from the site has been a game-changer for us," adds Antonio Ianni, BIM Manager at Conack. 

"It gives us an extra edge of communicating with our field teams. There are always things you can do better, but when you think about BIM, it makes sense for there to be that strong connection to the work that is happening out in the field—and for it to be connected to everything else on the platform."