As Tasmania’s civil industry faces a post covid boom, CONQA is helping the team at Hudson Civil Products to save time and energy, while reducing the need to manually compile paper-based information.
Hudson Civil Products is Tasmania’s leading manufacturer and supplier of infrastructure products for the civil construction, mining, building development and rural sectors.
Engineering Officer Michael Ross provides key strategic and technical advice on complex projects and operational matters. For 20 years, Hudson Civil has grown from a small precast manufacturing facility to an industry leader in major precast products and innovative design, as well as being a key provider of civil plumbing supplies and solutions.
"Quality Assurance provides confidence to the Hudson team that it’s meeting the design intent, especially around reinforcing requirements & Australian standards, to ultimately reduce risk across the board", says Ross.
Before using CONQA, paper-based systems would be a challenge as documents would get lost or damaged, and they were hard to consolidate and organise, he says.
“Providing a customer with a complete package of information would take hours and hours to compile. It would be really difficult to have all of the information organised and clear in real-time, especially as some clients mightn’t be able to make an inspection, or they’d want to come to see progress before and during the project.”
CONQA has reduced a huge portion of Ross’s and his team’s time and workload, he says. CONQA’s digital capability means everything is uploaded in real-time, it can’t be lost, and the photographs are time-stamped, he says.
“I’d spend so much time compiling Quality Assurance documents, which meant I had to work a lot of overtime. Instead, I’ve been able to spend that time with my family and sometimes on the golf course. The time saved has been valuable for the wider team, as we’ve been able to use that time to focus more on training employees.”
On a wider scale, the Tasmanian civil industry has boomed as a result of the pandemic, he says. Increased government spending has meant the next 12 months are going to be the busiest the industry has ever faced.
It means production needs to be as efficient as possible; there needs to be an investment in better time management, and quality control needs to be transparent across the board, he says.
“We need accountability now more than ever. We need clear and timely ways to show our partners what we’re working on, what we do, and the quality of our products.”
It’s for these reasons that Ross is championing CONQA, even to colleagues that may feel hesitant to adopt a digital QA system.
“It’s fantastic. It’s very user friendly and it certainly saves time and is great in terms of transparency. Some of the team aren’t computer savvy and they picked it up with no-issues.”
