Shepherd saves with wireless IT

Shepherd Construction's trial use of wireless technology in its site office on a £42m development in London's Docklands has been so successful that the wireless fidelity (wifi) alternative to conventional cabling will be rolled out on all the company's future contracts valued at more than £20m.IT manager Neil Tennant said there was pressure to find an innovative solution because when the project reaches the halfway stage, the area occupied by the site office will be gobbled up by the ongoing 23-storey residential development. Site operations will then transfer to a barge in the nearby dock.Cabling the existing site office conventionally was priced at 6,500 with the wifi alternative, coming in at 5,250. "We have 30 devices here, such as PCs, printers and scanners," said Tennant. "Just typical of any equivalent site office. It saved two working weeks on installation time. An earlier move from temporary huts to where we are now was also quick and seamless."Many of the staff didn't know we had gone down the wifi route and didn't notice the difference until it came to the obvious reduction in cables to trip over."Shepherd has a group turn-over of 550m, with the construction division accounting for 400m of this. It typically has 35 sites running at any one time and the average contract value is about 10m.Given the task of drawing up a shortlist of wifi providers, Tennant evaluated them on three main issues: reliability, security and cost. IT director Zoe Turnbull reviewed the shortlist and selected Link Information Technology, based in Wrexham."We have opted for two levels of security," said Tennant. "We are both MAC-bonded and have used WEP encryption protocol. The risk with a poorly guarded system is that someone outside the site could see Shepherd's pricing and inner organisational details. "A subcontractor still in competition, for example, could potentially see the other bids and come in slightly lower. We've tackled that risk."Paul Steele, project manager at Discovery Dock, said the wifi system has proved reliable, resisting interference from outside wireless frequencies and magnetic fields originating from the Docklands Light Railway that runs next to the office."Much of the 5,250 spend was a one-off cost on items that can be moved to the next site, so the price advantage over conventional cabling will widen," said Tennant. "We'll roll the technology out across all our larger projects in the future - the next for the wifi treatment will be our new £30m contract in Gateshead," Tennant added.