Our CEO and co-founder, Dan O’Donoghue, sat down with James Benington, director of one of CONQA’s first customers, Sansom.
James specialises in the facade, seismic joints and waterproofing side of Sansom’s business for all commercial, civil, and residential projects. His highly trained teams are constantly managing a variety of products & suppliers, with one of their challenges being the scope and complexity of information they have to be across. With so many different aspects to their business, James says “we have a lot of data to stay on top of and keep updated. It’s quite a variety, quite specialised and it’s quite hard to do well.”
Sansom uses CONQA for their prestart, handover, and completion inspections which were previously documented by paper. Since moving to a digital QA system, Sansom no longer has to deal with “the great paper shuffle” or having documents accidentally misplaced, but they did need to ensure their site team were confident using the software. James says “we’ve moved the goalposts: these guys have been hands on, intelligent people that know all of the ways to do everything on site but they’re not IT savvy, so we’ve got to keep it as simple for them as we can to help them do well.”
Since implementing CONQA on site, Sansom has credited the product for its support in driving consistency and keeping things simple. With CONQA’s customisable checklist system, Sansom has been able to keep the site team engaged by avoiding “huge onerous documents with a thousand data entry points or clicks or checks.” Instead, James prefers to keep enough information to see what his team are doing whilst ensuring that the user isn’t spending all day inputting data.
Now being one of our most engaged customers, Sansom adds photos and files to their checks as evidence to further document their work and build transparency with their clients. James states “the main benefit for us is that we can track our whole process on site from when we get asked to start something right through to when we hand it back over to the client. It’s great as it shows we have nothing to hide. We’re an open book, whether that’s the good, the bad, or the ugly.”
James speaks more about the value he gets out of using CONQA and says “a benefit for us is that we can sell the use of CONQA with our tenders. The main contractor knows that they’re going to have something robust to help them with council audits of their quality assurance systems. It makes it easier for them to award us tenders knowing that we’re going to support them and make their life easier.”
From their site team to main contractors to council, Sansom has been able to be more transparent and consistent when it comes to their Quality Assurance process and we are proud to be on this journey alongside them.
