The story of Albanna Engineering & Construction, or ABEC, is not just a success story. It is a turnaround story. When ABEC’s current CEO, Abdel-Monem Assy, joined the company, he knew he had a firm with a great client portfolio and over 30 years of experience in the industry to draw upon. But he could also see it was desperately in need of reform.
“I used to work for clients in the area as a contractor, and from a connection we had I knew Albanna Engineering & Construction had some issues and that the CEO who had been there for 18 years was going to be replaced,” says Assy.
Assy had been working at a Canadian engineering firm but felt in need of a new challenge. He did his executive MBA in 2018 at London City University, and in November 2019 he took over ABEC.
ABEC is a local, 100% minority-owned company specialising in the oil & gas construction and engineering industries. Established in 1984, the company works with power plants, smelters, waste management plants and ports, but primarily focuses on the mechanical piping sector.
The company’s portfolio of clients includes all the top-tier oil and gas clients in the UAE, and since it was recently awarded ADNOC approval, that list is only set to grow. However, among all that potential, Assy could clearly see areas that were in serious need of investment and improvement.
“The company lacked a lot in terms of management and had close to zero capacity in terms of digital technologies,” he recalls. “I established a strategy, both long and short term, over five pillars.”
Those pillars were Lean, Agile, Complete Digitalisation, Smart Business Development and Sound Culture. Assy began cutting unnecessary costs, altering processes to become more agile and quicker to respond. The company began targeting medium-sized projects in the $10 to $150 million segment. But Assy also wanted to change the culture within the company.
“I found a lack of transparency and not enough healthy internal conflict. I promoted that, telling people to voice their opinions,” Assy says.
A Digital Revolution
But the real breakthrough came when Assy sought to upgrade the company’s woefully ill-equipped digital capabilities. ABEC did not have enough IT resources, and while Assy tried to outsource the creation of this module to another firm, when the results did not meet ABEC’s needs he was forced to let them go.
ABEC needed a software system that was efficient, agile, and also fully automated.
But as the saying goes, if you want a job done right…
“My IT manager told me, ‘We know what you want’. So, we built the tools internally. The platform we needed wasn’t available, so we developed it ourselves,” Assy says simply.
It was a bold play. As Assy admits, “Even I wasn’t sure it was going to work.”
ABEC set about creating its own platform, with one workflow that would bring in finances and procurement and HR, linking everything together to create a piece of software that did not exist anywhere else in the construction sector.
It introduced a new capability to construction projects – the ability to track daily progress.
“Nobody else does that,” Assy says simply. “There are daily event logs that any staff can view on their phone, input any delays that have happened and even upload a picture if necessary.”
Typically a construction site will have an activity schedule, with updates from the site delivered sometimes as infrequently as once a week. To make things worse, they are not always accurate.
“In my previous position at the Canadian firm, we used to hire people called site planners who would go on-site just to check the information coming through is correct,” Assy says.
When Assy took over ABEC, the first thing he wanted to do was implement a platform that would allow him to see what was happening on-site every day, as it happened.
“With what we have created we can see what has happened on any given date, including all the man hours that have gone into any specific action, the levels of productivity, and the list of people who worked on it. It offers high levels of detail, very simply presented for site engineers,” he enthuses.
It was soon clear this was more than an in-house tool, becoming a platform and product in its own right.
But to make the most of this opportunity, Assy needed to solve more than technical problems alone.
Introducing Transparency
“A challenging aspect of this industry is there is a lot of unnecessary secrecy,” Assy reflects. “Information is hidden between the clients and consultants on the project. For some reason in this industry specifically, there is a big problem with that. There is no trust between most of the parties involved.”
For this platform to work, ABEC would have to build that trust with clients and contractors, telling them what happened, what delays occurred and the reason behind them.
“Even my own staff were not used to that,” Assy tells us. “I had to lead by example and really start communicating more.”
It was then that the Covid pandemic hit, and businesses all over the world soon learned some stark lessons in communication. Assy himself introduced a routine of company-wide communications to keep everyone on the same page.
“You have to start from the top, and every time there is news we issue a company-wide communication,” Assy tells us. “We keep people up to date on what’s happening from the top level downwards.”
Of course, the important thing about communication is that it goes two ways.
“I made sure people didn’t just follow instructions, they got involved. I want people to have an opinion and that starts from the top,” Assy says.
Today the system is fully implemented, with all its modules in place across every discipline in the construction industry. As Assy points out, “The amount of money you save with such a platform is crazy. There are no papers, workflow documents or POs. It is all very simple, quick, and efficient.”
But the biggest step is still to come.
“Our suppliers and even our competitors are interested in this, but we don’t know how comfortable they will be sharing all this information with us. So we are launching it as a separate company,” Assy says. “We found a name for it, ‘Elevate’, and it will take Albanna Engineering & Construction’s digital capabilities and create a new platform and company to elevate the construction industry’s digital capabilities.”
For Assy, this has been the realisation of a vision.
“I’m a big fan of digitalisation. I have a lot of knowledge in the construction industry but even I didn’t know how far it would go,” he says. “By believing that digital tools and openness and quick information is the way to go, we saw the platform grow, and grow and grow, and it is now our crown jewel. Flipping 180 degrees from the secrecy of the industry led to this fully fledged product.”
