“Overall our strategy has been to follow and support our clients, and we tend to access one or two new locations every year,” explains Ardmac Managing Director, Jason Casey. “Apart from our more established locations, we are also pursuing work in new areas such as the Nordics, Spain and Portugal.” As part of its strategy for the future, Ardmac has now welcomed Cental – a leading and fast-growth provider of advanced modular infrastructure to the data centre, pharma, utilities and telecoms industries – to the Group. Cental’s manufacturing capability will support Ardmac’s ongoing agreement with US-based Germfree Laboratories, to provide prefabricated turnkey modular cleanrooms and biosafety laboratories to the biopharma and healthcare sectors throughout Europe. It will provide a manufacturing base for all other Ardmac modular solutions under one roof. In tandem with the evolution of its business and the development of its senior leadership team, the firm has also recently made some strategic assignments. Jason is now Managing Director for operations covering Ardmac’s Pharma, Data Centre and Battery business units across Ireland, the UK and Europe, while Enda Murphy is Managing Director of its Modular, Med Tech and Micro- electronic business units, while also taking a lead pre-con role in Pharma and Battery. Ian Madden is now strategic lead for off-site construction, Karen O’Hara is Head of Sales and Marketing and Hugh Ward also joined the business recently as Director of Interiors.
Jason. “However, we have had challenges like these before; our experience and approach during these times has been our strength, and we have built our resilience further through developing our processes and practices. A focus on vertical integration including having our own direct labour with developed specialist skills certainly helps mitigate resource challenges in the field.” Funding construction projects, meanwhile, “hasn’t changed in generations,” he says, with a significant proportion of project funding risk sitting with the contractors. “Project retention is a mechanism that has operated in the sector for many years, and is a significant financial cost for contractors. There are solutions out there, such as retention bonds, but the industry needs to embrace these and remove some of the funding pressures for contractors in what is already a relatively low-margin industry.” Ardmac implements the latest proven technology to improve processes and add value for customers, improve efficiencies and solve industry-specific problems. Its Digital Construction Team is at the forefront of innovation, constantly exploring how the latest tools, software applications and hardware can be deployed to support and enhance the work of its project and field teams. “We have been using Lean since 2015, BIM for over 10 years, and we have been using our field management platform Procore since 2018,” says Jason. “There are tangible benefits to adopting any of these, but when we combine features of all three, we call it Building Smart. By using all three in tandem, we are observing even greater benefits than we would if we used any of these alone. All our information is cloud based and accessible on any web-enabled device.”
CHALLENGES
Ardmac is facing the same challenges as the rest of the industry in the form of Covid fallout, Brexit and the war in the Ukraine. “Fluctuation in material costs and availability, as well as market pressure on resources, are significant,” says
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