covid 19 certainly put a spanner in the works for everyone. read how we manage to keep our sites open.
The outbreak of Covid 19 meant challenges for everyone around the world from a business point of view. Almost overnight, many businesses were made to close, limit the way they operated, or rethink the way they did business.
“ Whilst the construction industry was one of the "lucky" industries to be given a green light to keep working here in WA, we knew from the onset that we needed to be vigilant and forward thinking if we wanted our sites to remain open and ensure our contractors could keep working.”
We had the double challenge of thinking about hygiene practice on sites where the traffic of people could be large and ever changing during the course of a day, plus we needed to think about our supply chain as quite quickly it was evident that transport and access to materials could be impacted.
how do you manage hygiene?
Building sites are busy and potentially "dirty". Let's face it, all that dust and dirt goes hand in hand with building. And hand washing is not something typical in a day for your average contractor. Yet here we are implementing hand washing stations and hourly site cleans!
Industrial orders of hand sanitiser were placed and have become the new "hand care" for all our sites.
Apprentices have been assigned the additional task of "site sanitising" and expected to disinfect all communal areas every hour.
Teams have been "split" so that sites can not be cross contaminated, should someone become infected. This means, contractors are assigned access to grouped site/s and can not work on any of our non assigned. This also means that if we do have a case, it won't shut down all of our operations and we can keep working.
how do we manage our supply chain?
We knew that our supply chain could be interrupted with regional and state border restrictions and closures. We acted quickly, before lockdown was even happening, and forecast longer timeframes for our orders. In most cases, we work on a 3 month forecast but we changed that to 6 months. We didn't want a lack of building materials being the reason our sites could stop.
"Obviously this puts a strain on cash flow. It took careful management and open communication with our clients to ensure we could do it. We were lucky that our clients understood and supported this decision."