When a company achieves success, it’s easy to coast and simply follow the same formula. However, this often leads to growing stale and uninnovative.
This is the antithesis of Antamex’s outlook, though. Founded in 1969 and headquartered outside of Toronto, Antamex, believes in taking calculated risks that challenge the industry norms. They’ve established business plans that allow for investment in products, tools, and business lines that set a foundation for years to come and encourage innovation.
Antamex is a leading North American unitized curtain wall company. It has completed nearly 100 custom projects, amassing in excess of 35 million sq/ft of custom unitized curtain wall façade solutions. Since 2018, Antamex has retooled its strategic outlook and made some major investments. The company has established a standalone reclad/restoration business unit that focuses on recladding high-rise and mid-rise towers across North America and has invested in robotics and technology to improve manufacturing and site operations.
Antamex is also the only company working in Canada to offer FuZeWALL, a patented, certified, fully engineered, unitized and factory glazed, revolutionary residential curtain wall system for high-performance facades.
“Because we have an integrated delivery model, risk is mitigated.”
– Shreya Upadhyaya
Besides being innovators, Antamex is a true one-stop-shop for clients looking for curtain walls. The company offers a vertically integrated delivery model with complete in-house design, engineering, manufacturing, and installation.
This approach offers a great benefit to their clients. “Because we have an integrated delivery model, risk is mitigated,” says Shreya Upadhyaya, a project manager at Antamex. “We can look at all aspects of the project and make any necessary corrections on site.”
Those sites that Antamex works on are primarily skyscrapers throughout the United States and Canada, as well as historical projects in Western Europe and South-East Asia.
Paper Processes Slow Collaboration
Today, construction is a fast-moving industry. In order to meet the challenge of speedy delivery of services while ensuring projects are completed correctly requires high levels of communication and collaboration.
At Antamex, their decision-making processes are founded upon open, honest and accurate communication directly between all internal and external stakeholders.
Keeping up with the pace of communication used to be a challenge for Antamex before turning to Procore Technologies. Some employees are old school and preferred to work on paper, resulting in Antamex documents being kept in various places.
Unfortunately, this system led to miscommunication and misplaced information. It also led to slowdowns as information tracking wasn’t standardized. It was also challenging to determine what data was the most accurate and up-to-date, further hurting collaboration.
Emails were not accounted for, and some correspondence got lost or was put on the backburner. Upadhyaya mentioned a missed email that included comments from an engineer about a project. The situation proved costly for Antamex as the engineer’s comments were not acted upon, and the issue was only noticed when work was already going on in the field. The project had to be slowed so corrections could be made.
For a company that prides itself on innovation, this level of communication was simply not cutting it.
Real-Time Collaboration Saves Money and Time
Antamex turned to Procore to help them communicate more effectively. The company strived to remain a top choice for customers by providing them the service and innovation they had come to expect.
Thanks to Procore’s project management software, the entire team can have access to relevant documentation. “It keeps everyone tied together and held accountable to time, cost and deliverables,” says Upadhyaya. “Because everyone can see what is happening, we can collaborate more easily and effectively.”
Live tracking of drawings via Procore also helps Antamex move projects along quickly. Since progress can be monitored in real-time, any occurring issues can be identified and fixed as they appear, saving the company time and money in the long run.
“Our guys on site have live docs and can see what’s required,” says Upadhyaya. “If they have a problem, we can track it and help them from the office.”
“If they have a problem, we can track it and help them from the office.”
– Shreya Upadhyaya
Besides fostering communication at Antamex, Procore helps the company save money in another way. There have been occasions where Antamex had done their part of the project, but another sub damaged it. When the damage was discovered by the general contractor, Antamex would be on the hook to fix it.
“Now, we document all our work and send a weekly update to the general contractor,” says Upadhyaya. “The general contractor can see the work was done as promised, and the money to repair the damage no longer comes out of our pocket.” Upadhyaya estimates these sorts of damages cost thousands of dollars on each project.
With Procore helping them to stay organized and connected in real-time, Antamex is well-positioned to continue to be a leader and innovator in the curtain wall industry.
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