CUSTOMER STORY

Since being active in 1991, Ghelamco Polska has delivered over 400,000 square meters of modern office space to the Polish market and has sold 15 projects in Poland for €850,000 million. These projects range from specialised class A office space, warehouses, and high-class residential projects. Ghelamco’s projects have shaped the business districts of Warsaw, Wola and Mokotów. More investments are being developed in the Wrocław and Katowice regions. They currently have four high-rise buildings under construction for 170.000 square meters.

Included in their portfolio is the most prestigious office property in Poland, the famous Warsaw Spire completed in 2016. This unique office is located in the Warsaw city centre equipped with the latest technological solutions, harmoniously built in a unique urban space with greenery designs, small architecture elements, fountains, and other leisure features. This building complex includes a 180 metre tower building with 49 levels, and two lower buildings at 55 metres with 15 building storeys. Another current project is the ambitious Warsaw Unit, designed to be a modern office building with timeless architecture. The building will feature a ‘dragon skin’ kinetic facade in one part with a few thousand moving plates. It will be a 202 meters structure for commercial spaces and food amenities once it’s completed in early 2021.

LetsBuild is currently being used for the Warsaw UNIT office building at Rondo Daszyńskiego.

In several projects where LetsBuild was and is being used, the challenges have included difficulties with communication and information exchange. Since both are large complex projects, lots of subcontractors are involved and a lot of communication clashes were inevitable including language and company culture barriers.

Ghelamco had a difficult time coordinating between and among subcontractors when it came to accurate and real-time information sharing. Working with different languages on site made collaboration even more challenging. LetsBuild was brought in at this point to sort this out.

Although faced with resistance from subcontractors at first (“Filling information on a tablet just wastes more of my time.” “I’ve always done things our way, why should we change?”), LetsBuild managed to bring a digital solution to Ghelamco’s construction site winning over the pen-and-paper mode of working.

The Warsaw Spire is a MIPIM awardee, winning the title of best office investment in the world in 2017. The Warsaw Unit is being built to be certified in the BREEAM system. Ghelamco Polska’s projects are built with the most professional standards and of the highest quality, while applying sustainable solutions. The processes to achieving these standards and requirements are very rigorous and their foundation is a solid communication and collaboration system. And that is what LetsBuild provided for Ghelamco.

To tackle Ghelamco’s multilingual communication and multi-subcontractor collaboration problems, LetsBuild provided the following solutions:

• • Tracking and tracing of subcontractor communication – by designing communication around specific processes and well-defined workflows in one single tool enabled transparent and real-time information sharing that can be easily checked and followed up by the project coordinator or project manager. Effective and efficient communication is achieved.

• • In-depth digital reporting – by enabling the subcontractors to capture and share data in real time and while on site, complete with photo attachments and other relevant information for context, no matter what language the subcontractor on the receiving side is speaking, the communication gap is bridged.

• • QHSE updating and reporting – with all the standards and requirements that Ghelamco Polska has to be rigid about, LetsBuild enabled Ghelamco to digitise and automate their quality and safety, and other regulatory processes for better and accurate compliance.

Using LetsBuild on site has won Ghelamco Polska at least four hours per week, especially in the reporting aspect. Additionally, they have gained efficiencies when it came to meetings with their subcontractors. As the LetsBuild-Ghelamco Polska projects are an ongoing partnership, we look forward to more productivity metrics and are excited to share our future findings.