Concor Buildings showcases flexibility on Makro Riversands Project

Visible Felt Leadership is a philosophy that Concor Construction drives and an excellent example of a project where this is reaping significant rewards is the Concor Buildings Makro Riversands contract.

Concor Buildings, previously known as Murray & Roberts Buildings, is part of Concor Construction which was recently acquired by a consortium led by Southern Palace Group.

This is an extremely busy construction site with activities on all faces with people and machinery moving everywhere, yet it does not seem congested and everyone seems to have a thorough knowledge of what needs to be done and why.

When completed the massive new Makro will be a 12-m-high single-storey structure that includes the store, offices and outbuildings. Roadways and parking areas are included in the contract.

The contract was awarded to Concor Buildings by Massmart in February 2017, however external issues outside of the contractor’s control led to a delay in being able to start concrete casting.

Contracts manager, Martin Muller said: “We were able to mobilise the necessary competent core team and implement the necessary acceleration in the programme to bring it back on track to ensure the store opening would not be compromised.”

“Resequencing and accelerating the programme has crashed all the activities with some of these now completely out of sequence. This has put pressure on ensuring that all information is received on time and requires monitoring of all activities on site to ensure that everything is done correctly the first time,” Muller says.

One of the primary challenges on the project is to keep close track of the actual costs versus the budget especially because of the accelerated programme. Also important is the close management of people and productivity. There are currently 565 people on site, expected to increase to over 1000 at project peak.

To keep rework and wastage to an absolute minimum, there is daily monitoring of brick and concrete usage and tracking the labour cost to complete these elements.

The first concrete was poured on May 3^rd and shortly thereafter the structural steel and concrete structure activities began concurrently.

Significantly, on the Makro Riversands structure the complete perimeter walls are being constructed with brick and mortar as opposed to the use of conventional dry wall and sheeting above the three metre level.

Muller says this type of building activity is more labour intensive and the height at which it is taking place necessitates using additional access handling equipment to enable full access to the 12-m structure, with increased focus on safety when working at height. More safety officers are also present around the site.

A significant portion of the labour force is from the local community, and wherever possible skills transfer is being done to ensure sustainability of the community. There are also a high number of interns on site. This is an extension of the existing Concor Construction programme with Go for Gold students and underpins the company’s commitment to supporting continued knowledge sharing, development and up-skilling of graduates.

Once completed Makro Riversands would have consumed a total of 1 million cement stock bricks, used 9 000 m³ of readymix.

Muller is ably assisted on this project by site agent, Andrew Kagaso and general foreman, Petrus Nthombeni.

More information from Tel: +27 (011) 590 5500 / email: info.construction@concor.co.za /

www.concor.co.za