PBC Today sat down with Garrett Chamberlain, Operations Manager at SymTerra, to discuss his journey, and how SymTerra, the integrated construction management software, can help to improve onsite communication and collaboration
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in the industry. How has your career progressed from an apprentice to the position that you’re in now?
My journey has been an interesting one, to say the least. It took me a while to get into construction – I didn’t know anybody in the industry. My dad was a black cab driver and my mum worked in the city, so it took me a while to get there.
My first break in construction was with a demolition company as a Traffic Marshal on Crossrail, from there I progressed to an apprenticeship at the Athletes Village for the London 2012 Olympics, which was fascinating. I remember arriving there, and I absolutely fell in love with it.
I soon started looking after small bits and pieces, including the paperwork side of construction. I won ‘Apprentice of the Project’ at the Olympics and progressed into a Site Manager role with other companies. That’s when I was trained to be a Health and Safety Adviser.
That is when I first came across SymTerra and met Sarah Crawley, our Managing Director. They were using this tool, built for site teams, which was very innovative and something I’d never seen before. I then got an offer from SymTerra, which was a complete pivot for me.
“SymTerra was an obvious choice to make for me because I could see the benefit straight away. It was a little scary because I’d been in an industry that really looked after me, but joining SymTerra is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”
I found that the skills and experiences that I had built up in the construction industry had not gone to waste as it is similar yet different in its own way. We’re swapping paperwork for digital paperwork, the principles are still there, we are just trying to make people’s lives easier.
How can communication in the workplace be improved with SymTerra’s construction management tool?
What I’ve seen in the past, especially from a health and safety aspect, is that all the paperwork goes into a file, which at the end of the job gets thrown into the skip. A few years down the line, when you need to get some information about a past job, it’s gone. Poor communication can have an overall detrimental impact on a project.
SymTerra is aimed at eliminating uncertainty and risk from construction sites. In a sector still reliant on analogue methods of communication and data capture, operating in a fast-evolving legislative landscape, the need for better and more efficient collaboration and data assurance has never been more critical. We’re set to resolve a unified pain point across all construction sites. It is also the missing link I wish I had when I was working on site.
With SymTerra, we allow easy, instant, and intuitive communication across multiple contractors to the same project. Clients, contractors, and subcontractors can now document works via images and videos, cross reference assets and activities, and share information instantly with who they need to. This also means that you can have unlimited users.
SymTerra is operational across 150 construction projects in the UK. How would you say that the technology has helped to improve works across these projects?
Those numbers now are starting to march up. We’re operational on over 200 projects now. We hit milestones every few weeks and we’ve now got over 15,000 SmartNotes on SymTerra, which averages at about every eight minutes, isn’t that fantastic?
That’s the key thing about SymTerra, people are adopting the technology because it is easy. Recently one of our users described himself as a ‘technophobe’, and believe it or not, he was the first person within SymTerra to hit 1000+ SmartNotes in just three months.
What makes us different is the flexibility we provide to our users. We’ve got teams of all sizes, small and large companies, using it to collect, connect, and collaborate. One of our clients is predominantly using it just for tag locations. That’s the beauty with SymTerra and the reason for easy adoption, it can work for different companies in different ways.
Driving site communication on the Liverpool Street Station upgrades
MTR and their contractor BCM used SymTerra’s integrated communication app on the recently completed Liverpool Street Station as part of the platform extension and renovations to enable the new Crossrail trains to use platforms 16 and 17.
SymTerra was adopted to obtain live updates from site on over 500 planned activities during the Easter blockade. The team updated the hour-by-hour programme in real-time, and identified changes to critical path activities, re-sequenced works, and re-allocated resources to ensure that the station was reopened in time. By using SymTerra, the team were able to have real-time oversight of what was happening, enabling them to make informed decisions and mitigate delays.
SymTerra enabled the team to obtain comprehensive visibility over what was happening on site and confidently report to stakeholders on progress. Using SymTerra, MTR provided cross-referenced project assurance and work records, exceeding Network Rail requirements.
The Liverpool Street Station project was one of the most documented blockades of its kind in the UK, with over 1,200 updates and over 3000 photos across three shifts a day and a 10-day period.
All works were completed within time, ensuring no delays to wider stakeholders, and the station reopened on time.
Can you tell me what common mistakes construction companies make when adopting new construction technology?
As an industry, construction has been slow in adopting and embracing technology. Construction is the second largest industry in the world, yet it is much behind. I know some people in the industry who have only just got a phone and a laptop within the last few years.
We’re all living with sprawling Word and Excel files, unmanageable WhatsApp groups and messages, and attachments too large to send via email. We know that reporting is broken, but there is a growing need to capture more assurance documentation on construction projects. So, what’s the solution?
Since the SymTerra team understands the industry from within, when new clients come to us, we listen to their pain points and what they need. It’s one of the things that we’re very good at as a business, and if we get suggestions from the client, we adapt to it.
We recently had a great suggestion from one of our clients about our location feature, we added a simple button, now known as ‘Emre’s button’, to clear past or mistakenly added locations. He suggested it on a Thursday, and by the end of the week, it was done.
What are your tips for onboarding new technology?
My biggest tip is for all readers to use SymTerra. One of the things I think, if you’re going to go into construction technology, is to try before you buy and not jump in and be sold the dream.
Get in there and have a go, try the product first, and talk to the people just like we do. Come and have a chat with us and see where the pain points are. Let us show you how we can help because it doesn’t have to cost an absolute fortune – you can get good construction tech that’s cost-effective. With SymTerra, you can connect your whole company for a nominal price.
Lots of my observations have been made based on people who have brought a product, and they want to run before they can crawl. Trust the process, and you’ll get a much better result out of it.
SymTerra
