Builder Sets Quality Benchmarks on Complex Water Upgrade

One powerful principle underpinned the largest and most ambitious environmental restoration program in New Zealand’s history—quality.

The upgrade of Watercare Services’ wastewater treatment in the Auckland suburb of Mangere raised water quality in the Manukau Harbour to its highest level since the 1930s.

But when Fletcher Construction was engaged to upgrade the existing wastewater treatment plant and deliver an advanced treatment facility, the challenge was enormous.

With more than 319 million litres of wastewater flowing through the facility every day, Mangere is New Zealand’s largest wastewater treatment plant. Any disruption to business-as-usual operations was not an option.

How could Fletcher Construction’s team deliver the highest quality outcomes while the plant remained fully operational?

The technical requirements of the project were extreme: ultra-violet disinfection facilities, new biosolids facilities, an upgrade of existing power supply, demolition of redundant plant, decommissioning 500ha of oxidation ponds and foreshore restoration.

Carefully staged construction and astute stakeholder management were required to achieve the highest quality results—and none of that could be delivered with paper or spreadsheets.

A mammoth 92 per cent of construction leaders across Australia see quality as a competitive advantage, according to Procore’s latest report, How We Build Now 2022. And yet, around a third of construction companies of all sizes still use paper to capture, track and manage data.

Rework—a signal that quality outcomes are slipping—takes up 16 per cent of the time budget on the average construction project across the Asia Pacific. One in four construction companies spend more than 20 per cent of their time on rework.

Speaking at the launch of How We Build Now, Fletcher Construction’s national quality and systems manager Scott Meads said that digital tools “lead towards better data capture, and that can help avoid or mitigate rework”. Digital tools enhanced decision-making by accelerating responsiveness and building transparency and trust within teams, he said.

But when Procore’s team stepped in to help Fletcher Construction, uncontrolled drawings were circulating manually, and correspondence and communications were managed by spreadsheets.

▲ Fletcher Construction undertook a complex upgrade to the Watercare Services wastewater treatment site in Auckland, New Zealand.

The solution was to implement Procore Project Management, Project Financials and Action Plans, which supports digital inspection test plans. These three tools helped Fletcher Construction’s team to implement a change-management process while integrating third-party apps, such as Zoom and Microsoft tools.

Procore dashboards tracked productivity and health and safety compliance. The Submittals tool was used to register and communicate everything from the design process to procurement, quality assurance to completion. This helped the project maintain its ambitious timeline.

Fletcher Construction design interface manager Matthew Stanford, who worked on the Mangere project, said Procore offered more than document control. “It’s helped us manage multiple complex projects with greater efficiency and faster timeframes”.

With platform insights, Fletcher Construction identified opportunities to overcome quality and timeline challenges on the Mangere wastewater project—and went on to implement Procore across its construction portfolio worldwide.

“Procore enabled true transparency and collaboration with multiple parties from day one. The direct upside of this is we can shave 75 per cent from our project completion timeline. That’s game-changing,” Matthew concludes.

Read more about how Procore helped Fletcher Construction set new quality benchmarks.

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