McKeon Group Secures Four-Year UCD Maintenance Contract

After a 12-month, two-stage process, we are delighted to announce that McKeon Group has been appointed by the estates team at University College Dublin as General Building Fabric Maintenance and Operation Services provider for the next four years.
 
This latest contract win, which will see a full-time, site-based headcount for McKeon Group, builds on the successful relationship established with UCD over the last decade through works carried out by our Mechanical Division on this impressive campus.
 
Huge thanks our colleagues across McKeon Group and to the estates team at UCD.
 

About McKeon Group

Established in 1950 and ISO certified for more than two decades, McKeon Group offers expert construction, fitout and building services. The family-run Group delivers projects, services and maintenance across a range of sectors for State, local authority, FDI and private clients. For more information, contact: www.mckeon.ie 

 

Future of the Workplace Post Covid-19

 

Earlier today, McKeon Group CEO Tomás Mac Eoin joined a panel of leaders within the facilities management sector to discuss the Future of the Workplace Post Covid-19. The discussion was hosted by Bernard Mac Oscair and Portobello Institute. 

 

The Institute has thoughtfully put together an ebook summarising some of the many insights exchanged between the expert panel, which also included Joan Mulvihill, Digitalisation Lead for Siemens in Ireland and Áine Mulcahy, Managing Director for OCS Ireland and Aviation UK. This ebook is available for download here: https://mckeon.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/The-Future-of-the-Workplace-Post-Covid-19-Post-Webinar-eBook.pdf

 

 

Highlights include a number of future-looking, insightful quotes from the panelists, as follows:

 

Bernard Mac Oscair 

“It’s really important for the facilities management industry that we start looking at what our options are as we go forward. What does that really mean in terms of contracts, in terms of technology and in terms of real delivery of service on the ground?”

 

Joan Mulvihill 

“The future comes down to the core of what the business does. One of the things that struck me over the last while is the role of facilities management in the context of organizations and their prominence now in businesses. I joked last year that we used to make funny little sitcoms about the IT crowd as the people who sat in the basement. It’s funny now that they are the most important people in the room. And it struck me that the facilities guy was the one they didn’t even make sitcoms about. They were subterranean to the IT crowd and now they’re the most important people in the room.”

 

Áine Mulcahy 

“A blended workplace is the most talked about work model of the past number of months. For many companies, the jury is still out on whether to adopt a hybrid work environment or keep the traditional five-day, on-site workweek. Employers cannot afford to stick with the status quo and we must now reimagine our working environment.”

 

Tomás Mac Eoin 

“Today, individuals have more options available to them around where and when they do their work, at Hereworks our role is in designing and integrating future workplace technology to facilitate this flexibility for the people who use the buildings, the building managers and the buildings greater community. We have been working with some of the largest companies in the world to integrate intelligent technologies in order to create a truly agile workplace, putting employee wellbeing front and centre. By applying new technologies and machine learning we have an opportunity to improve space utilisation, transform a buildings energy dynamics, introduce predictive control, automate fault diagnosis and change the role of facilities managers in buildings that are constantly adapting to the needs of their occupants.”

 

Tomás also discussed some of the exciting work currently being undertaken by the team at Hereworks, part of the McKeon Group, and particularly the emerging role of Master Systems Integrator:

 

“The big trend in technology we’re seeing from customers is for the Master Systems Integrator service. Companies have all this data in their buildings and the systems are all working perfectly, but independent of each other. Whether it be a room booking system or  space analytics system, they’re not talking to each other in a common environment so the company isn’t harnessing all that information. People who have our technology realize they can see the insights into it and obviously the people who don’t have the technology are looking to add it to new buildings or existing buildings…” Learn more at https://hereworks.ie 

 

 

About McKeon Group

Established in 1950 and ISO certified for more than two decades, McKeon Group offers expert construction, fitout and building services. The family-run Group delivers projects, services and maintenance across a range of sectors for State, local authority, FDI and private clients. For more information, contact: www.mckeon.ie

 

 

Integrating the new generation of construction talent into a third generation firm

 

Digital Transformation in Construction: Bringing all the team along

 

2020 was a big year for the McKeon Group team as we celebrated 70 years in business https://mckeon.ie/mckeon-group-celebrates-70-years-in-the-industry/. Originally established by Tom McKeon back in 1950, McKeon Construction started life as one man and his van. From making bricks to crafting his own hand tools, Tom was an innovator whose work ethic and values are reflected in the company he founded, seven decades on. 

Over the past 70 years, McKeon Group has grown into a third generation, multi-million euro construction contractor in the education, residential and commercial sectors.  In 2011, the mechanical division was founded and McKeon Group was formed. By that time, McKeon Construction had already developed a technology and electrical division and was well positioned to extend the services available to clients, with a focus on innovation. In fact, last year McKeon Group was approved as a registered training provider with Engineers Ireland, offering an exciting and thought-provoking CPD ‘Innovate Together to clients and colleagues across the construction industry. You can find more information about this CPD offering here: https://mckeon.ie/new-cpd-innovate-together/ 

 

The early adoption of emerging technologies for the industry has played a huge role in the successful scaling of the business. Speaking to construction technology provider Pipedrive recently, Sales & Marketing Director Paul McKenna explained “Our USP is the completion of complex projects in live environments. With that end-to-end technical skillset of a construction division, mechanical services, electrical services, there’s a minor works team, and the technology division is a separate company now called Hereworks—automation, smart buildings and more”.

 

Of course, digital transformation in any industry is about so much more than technology – its ultimate success always comes down to people. The most important asset of our business is the people, many of whom have been with us for decades. As the construction industry finds itself in the midst of a digital transformation (or revolution?) that has been massively accelerated as a result of Covid-19, the McKeon Group team is driving this transformation. With newly-qualified graduates working on projects alongside more established team members, we know first-hand the importance of being a progressive workplace that fosters a culture of shared learning and cooperation.

 

Culture is central to successful transformation

A digitally-focused company empowers the team to deliver faster and attracts the right talent from multiple disciplines. A truly successful digital culture, however, requires a workplace where everybody is open to innovation (even if they don’t agree on the methodologies!) and is ready to embrace the future. 70 years on and though much has changed for McKeon, the fundamentals remain true – a company is only as good as its people. A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that of 40 digital transformations, companies that focussed on a culture of collaboration were five times more successful than those that focused on other priorities. Integrating a new generation of talent is therefore vital to the long-term success of a forward-looking organisation.

 

Embracing Change

Central to the embracing of changing digital culture is demonstrating the value of new technology that can potentially transform how projects are undertaken. For example, data is already being used in construction to identify behaviour patterns amongst building teams to pinpoint pain points and possibly automate repetitive tasks. This sort of information requires interdisciplinary collaboration from the ground level up to gather machine-readable information and then convey the findings back to relevant teams. By allowing people with differing perspectives and differing levels of experience to collaborate on specific projects from the ground level up, entire companies learn to work together and embrace the benefits of transformation. Similarly, virtual and augmented reality is another exciting area of change  for construction managers and site teams, who can observe projects remotely or visualize project changes on the fly. Immersive technologies for the built environment came into their own over the pandemic and they are crucial to the future of construction, however, its adoption on site depends entirely on a digital culture being fully embraced by everyone in the team.

 

A culture of learning

While the construction industry has historically had a less-than-stellar reputation for the uptake of digitalization, in the post-covid landscape the time is now right for integrating technology at a deep company level. We know from experience over the past number of decades that innovation is achieved through a collaborative attitude, with shared learning at its heart. Therefore, all team members have a vital role to play in digital transformation as they are in a position to identify gaps in digital skills and identify opportunities for new and established employees to work together. In our experience, age or the number of years in the industry is not an accurate indicator of a person’s openness to new technologies, this invariably comes back to an individual having a growth mindset. Fortunately, a growth mindset is one of the characteristics we value most when recruiting new people to join our team!

 Team-led collaboration encourages knowledge sharing in the workplace and builds confidence in trialling emerging technologies to a greater extent than management-led dictats. But a culture of learning isn’t simply something that is undertaken for a while and then overlooked. We understand that success and team satisfaction ultimately depends on a workplace encouraging the continuous sharing of ideas and knowledge from all team members.

 

Bringing the whole team along

The most important thing is to not leave anyone behind. While the future is most certainly digital, the established ways of doing things are still something that the next generation can learn from and integrate into a workplace culture going forward. Over the last 15 months, we have found that remote gatherings of employees can be a great way to encourage this workplace culture of collaboration and connectivity. By having all team members come together and share ideas everyone gets to share perspectives and feel comfortable learning from each other. The one positive side effect of such an unprecedented crisis as that faced by the entire industry since March 2020, is that it calls for unprecedented solutions. Not all teams are comfortable with this, whereas at McKeon Group, innovation is in our DNA – quite literally.

 

About McKeon Group

Established in 1950 and ISO certified for more than two decades, McKeon Group offers expert construction, fitout and building services. The family-run Group delivers projects, services and maintenance across a range of sectors for State, local authority, FDI and private clients. For more information, contact: www.mckeon.ie

 

 

Evolving role of HVAC systems to mitigate the spread of COVID-19

 

Following on from our previously published article on ‘Understanding the role of building ventilation in curbing the spread of COVID-19 in 2021’, which can be accessed here https://mckeon.ie/understanding-the-role-of-building-ventilation-in-curbing-the-spread-of-covid-19-in-2021/, this week – as workplaces prepare for the return of staff and customers – we are exploring the role of HVAC systems and how these are evolving to mitigate the spread of the virus. 

As mechanical and electrical specialists, when approaching HVAC installations or upgrades, the first step is always to understand the overall needs of the clients and the specific needs of the building, with consideration to the existing infrastructure, building and control systems. There is no ‘one size fits all solution’, rather, our team develops a custom-designed solution that meets clients demands in terms of optimising operational and energy efficiency, and increasing user comfort. Going forward, greater control over plant and equipment is likely to be prioritised by the building operators, together with an enhanced, integrated user interface.

There are a number of HVAC measures that have been proven to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, according to industry resource website https://www.facilitiesnet.com/hvac/article/3-HVAC-Measures-To-Fight-COVID-19–19283, including:

  

1) HEPA filtration: High efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters can remove more than 99.9 percent of particles with a diameter of 0.3 microns or greater, including pollen, dust, some bacteria and some viruses. The coronavirus has a diameter of about 0.1 microns, however, as the virus typically attaches to exhaled water droplets that are 5 microns or larger, they can be trapped by a HEPA filter. 

2) Outdoor-air ventilation rates: HVAC systems have evolved to operate with a minimum of outside air. Increased levels of outdoor air will dilute contaminants inside, including COVID-19, however, this increases heating and air conditioning costs as the system must raise or lower the temperature of outside air to the temperature of the conditioned space. According to the previously mentioned article, higher rates of outdoor-air ventilation might not help much in the fight against the coronavirus, “but higher ventilation rates coupled with other good practices can curtail the spread of the virus from one area in a building to another area served by the same system”.

3) Humidity levels: Research has now shown that the virus remains airborne longer and can travel farther in dryer conditions, therefore relative humidity of 40-60 percent might help limit the spread of the coronavirus. The article cautions that not all HVAC systems can maintain these high humidity levels year round so the operation of the systems and spaces should be monitored for signs of condensation and/or mold.

 

The above measures prioritise minimising the spread of Covid-19, which can – temporarily – run contrary to energy efficiency and best practice. For more about this, please see McKeon Group insights on ‘COVID-19 Preventative Measures vs. Energy Conservation in Office Buildingshttps://mckeon.ie/covid-19-preventative-measures-vs-energy-conservation-in-office-buildings/ . For expert advice, contact the team at www.mckeon.ie.

 

About McKeon Group

Established in 1950 and ISO certified for more than two decades, McKeon Group offers expert construction, fitout and building services. The family-run Group delivers projects, services and maintenance across a range of sectors for State, local authority, FDI and private clients. For more information, contact: www.mckeon.ie