Construction company changes

Wates, a construction, development and property services company, plans changes to adjust to a post-pandemic life.

Part of the changes involve focusing on Wates Residential, their housing arm, alongside supporting its public sector division and focusing on off-site manufacturing. Helen Bunchhas, who previously was the managing director of a different division, has been appointed as executive managing director of Wates Residential.

The construction arm of the business will increase its focus on off-site manufacturing.

Chief executive David Allen said: “The last four months have challenged all of us in new ways.  Working together, the team here at Wates has met those challenges with great ingenuity, determination and success.  

“Our business and our strategy have been tested and have proved to be robust.  We are now adjusting our structure to focus on the great opportunities that we believe lie ahead in our key sectors.  

“These changes give us the best possible prospects of thriving in the current environment and once the coronavirus crisis has passed and we’re confident that our future direction is clear.”

Many construction contractors and clients require contractor staff to hold and display Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) smart-cards, which prove their qualifications, before allowing them on site.

Here at Time and Attendance South East, we are an IT partner of the CSCS through our parent company, Tensor plc. This means that we can provide seamless integration between the CSCS smartcard and our WinTA.NET software, which provides time management, visitor/contractor management and fire/evacuation roll-call systems.

The integration takes the end-user form of a CSCS “card wizard”. This set of rules allows a company to quickly grant construction contractors recognition by and access to our hardware, such as clocking terminals, turnstiles, and door controllers. The wizard will run one of three scenarios when giving access rights to contractors. These are:

• Contractors who are completely new to the system.
• Contractors whose name exists on the system but their CSCS card has not been entered.
• Contractors who are fully recorded on the system and have used their card at other sites, but are new to this particular site.

For each different scenario the wizard will guide the user through the enrolment procedure. The result is that:

• The contractor’s CSCS card is read (using a USB card reader attached to a PC)
• Details are extracted from the card to update the contractor’s details within the system
• Options such as a company, site, shift group and department are assigned to the cardholder

To make it easier to include new contractors in your site’s existing health and safety and security procedures, please contact us today. We can handle any size site: our Enterprise software is able to perform for global, multi-site corporations with thousands of employees/users, while our Start edition helps small businesses with less than 50 users.