At Designer Group we recognise World Quality Week, which acknowledges quality and the importance of always delivering for our clients. We are proud to celebrate our industry and the high standards we reach each and every day internationally. Shane Blaney, our Group QEHS Director, Vice Chairman CQI Ireland and a Chartered Quality Professional with the Chartered Quality Institute says; 

“Quality is a mindset; we should respect our skills and continue to drive our industry high standards. Construction validation principles demand that safety and quality are designed into our projects, however today’s challenge in our industry is to best define our quality processes that control and maximise the probability that the validation process meets specification and ensures customer satisfaction. At Designer Group, innovation is at the forefront of our thinking, our journey to digital validation is a key differentiator in our delivery from our competitors, allowing us to lead the way across our industry.” 

At Designer Group, we recognise the impact of current and new technology and by utilising partners such as Trimble, we have challenged our business to innovate and drive new processes and methods of validation. 

Our digital journey started in 2016, mandated by our Group CEO Michael Stone. It is through his commitment to drive a smarter and leaner delivery that we have energised our business to fully digitalise our approach.  

We believe that big journeys begin with small steps, and a quote by Aristotle helped us to simplify and succeed on our digital journey. 

“First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.” 

It is with our strong leadership, passion to deliver and a drive to set benchmarks that helped Designer Group to reach our quality and digital goals.  

Our journey objective was to improve our core day to day quality processes, defect management and inspections. However, while working on multiple projects in 2016, the business continued to identify waste in our validation and turn over. It was this evaluation that drove our change in mindset into digital validation exercises.  

Traditional methods encouraged hard copy turn over packs, leading to increased quality engineering and document control resources to manage our validation exercises. In addition, it required manual scheduling of construction activities that served as key dependencies to our validation deliverable. It was at this stage, we encouraged a digital cultural change. We define this as ‘digital accountability’.  

By automating our validation process in line with our construction schedule we were able to pre-determine validation tasks providing: 

A clear process for construction dependencies tracking

Schedule activities

Improve accountability of both Designer Group and our supply chain

Stakeholder vision

Accurate measurement

Drive improvement

Digitisation provides better ability to measure and evaluate. Over the past 5 years, Designer Group have conducted over 70,145 quality inspections, living our quality promise, and leading our industry.  

Our ability to review and improve has curated a culture of measurement through our operations teams, resulting in an enhanced Gold Standard process and digital delivery method. 

All such improvements align with our core value – Deliver. We take every opportunity to go the extra-mile and rise to the occasion. Our passion for progress means we give uncompromising attention to impact and excellence. We ask our people to be resourceful, efficient and above all, make us proud. Our driver is recognition and celebration of a successful outcome for all. Relationships deliver results. Together we are stronger! 

Our innovative tablet-based software, #Fieldview, is leading the way in formulation of our online quality documents and health and safety reporting. We invite you to watch the below video which demonstrates our tablet-based quality software in use on one of our high-profile projects.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksr2DjV71_Y