Formed in 1986 as a privately owned, family run business, GMI Construction has grown to become a well-established, successful and award-winning building and construction services company with operations spanning multiple sectors and geographic regions.
GMI is focused on delivering high quality, energy efficient and highly complex construction projects from inception to completion, meeting tight programme deadlines and rigorous specifications. Their commitment to quality and safety standards has earned them consecutive awards with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents health and safety rankings.
GMI’s recently completed Ibis Styles hotel renovation was part of a larger scheme of hotel projects for Leeds City Centre. The 134 bed hotel includes family and accessible bedrooms, a 4,000 square foot restaurant and the refurbishment of ground floor units and external spaces to create public interface and retail opportunities.
Thomas West is GMI Construction’s Information and Communications Technology Manager. His team was tasked with replacing antiquated paper systems with a more robust, secure and holistic approach to site management — particularly regarding tracking change orders and working through snagging or task lists needed to monitor work quality and contract conformation for all craftsman.
For the Ibis Styles project, West utilised Trimble Viewpoint Field View deployed on mobile tablets to the job site. He registered 15 users to the program, including some key subcontractors. When a team member arrived onsite, they could easily check out a tablet and get a real-time snapshot of all open items and work flows, including ones specific to their area of responsibility. For West, Viewpoint Field View’s ease of use was key to early adoption of the mobile-based document and workflow management system. He explains, “The best thing about Viewpoint Field View is its ease of use. You can hand a tablet to somebody on site with very little training as it’s intuitive enough for them to use and find their way around the system. It also has a very powerful search feature that allows you to run searches against sub-contractors or trades, against specific rooms or floors.”
Focused on catching and resolving snag issues accurately and quickly, West appreciates the time and cost savings realised with Viewpoint Field View. “Another big benefit of the system is its accuracy. You can be really specific when raising a snag with a specific location on a floor plan and you can attach a photo so there can be no confusion,” he says. “There’s also the risk of having numerous snagging lists in circulation. You could potentially miss an issue that you only pick up at the end of the project and then you have the costs of having to resolve that – that could involve stripping back walls to get to the point you missed earlier – with a system like Viewpoint Field View it’s identified earlier and can be resolved straight away.”
The type of efficiency created by Viewpoint Field View resulted in a substantial reduction in man hours and money over the course of the project. “On this project alone, I estimate we’ve saved between two to three hours per man per day. In terms of cost savings we’re saving £750 to £1,000 per day – so over a 51 week construction period this really adds up to a significant savings .”
