Al Jaber Engineering - High Quality, Delivered Fast BFM86

ALJABER ENGINEERING

HIGH QUALITY, DELIVERED FAST

ALJABER ENGINEERING

WE LEARN HOW ALJABER ENGINEERING HAS ACHIEVED THE HOLY GRAIL OF CONSTRUCTION: HIGH QUALITY, AND FAST DELIVERY.

HIGH QUALITY, DELIVERED FAST PROJECT MANAGED BY: GLEN NEWTON

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AlJaber Engineering was found in 1995, and after 26 years has become a leading engineering company as well as a holding company supporting 20 affiliated businesses.

W

e started as AlJaber Engineering then we decided to go into other activities within the company, then decided to stay purely as a contracting company and spin our other activities off into

separate companies, creating partnerships in other fields to complement our activities,” explains Osama Hadid, CEO of AlJaber Engineering. “JEC remains the contracting construction arm of the Al Jaber Group. We have a company called Al Jaber Trading and Contracting in the Group that is also a construction company, but AlJaber Engineering is a more diversified contractor.

Through a lot of partnerships and joint-ventures, we’ve developed into a contractor

involved in almost every kind of major project.”

AlJaber Engineering’s work has been seen in the construction of the Doha Metro project, and the firm was one of five companies from several nations involved in constructing the Orbital Highway, a USD 1.68 billion project.

Currently, AlJaber Engineering is building a FIFA World Cup stadium and unique strategic food security facilities inside Hamad Port.

“This project is a very unique food processing facility, probably the only one in the

Orbital Highway & Truck Route.

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world with these processes and capacity,” Hadid tells us. “It’s going to be a unique project designed and build by AlJaber Engineering.”

THE BEST QUALITY AT THE BEST SPEED

What makes AlJaber Engineering stand out is that it challenges the received wisdom that quality and speed-of-delivery are conflicting concerns.

“We have two major selling points- delivery and quality.

In construction, delivery and quality are the two main priorities but they often don’t go together,” Hadid admits. “Highspeed delivery can compromise quality, and being careful about quality slows you down. So to marry the two and deliver highquality fast-track projects is very difficult in construction.”

Osama Hadid, Chief Executive Officer, AlJaber Engineering.

According to Hadid, achieving both of these seemingly contradictory goals at once is a question of company culture.

“It requires capable people who can do the job right and do it right the first time,” Hadid points out. “It’s the quality of people and procedures you have that decide if you can achieve these two targets together.”

As well as having highly qualified people, AlJaber Engineering’s quality is assured through the use of independent QA. “We have quality assurance and control, but we also have a quality assurance and safety company we hire, and they are independent,” Hadid says.

“They don’t report to us and so they have the freedom to make sure quality controls and safety procedures are implemented.”

In offering rapid delivery, the solution is more straightforward.

As Hadid says, “In delivery, it’s having the sources and the

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FIFA World Cup Al Thumama Stadium.

Doha Metro Project - Gold Line.

stamina. Construction is a hardworking environment. If you have the company culture you can achieve the targets you have set for yourself.”

SEEKING NEW CHALLENGES

That culture is defined by the desire to seek out new challenges and overcome them. It’s an attitude that’s led

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to AlJaber Engineering taking on a variety of megaprojects.

But JEC is now undergoing a strategic shift that will see it take on different kinds of challenges.

“Our construction business is full of challenges and that’s what makes it exciting because it’s never the same. Things change every day and new challenges come up all the time. As JEC has grown it has come across new challenges. In 2014 we won close to 10 billion riyals of projects in one year, launching a measured transformation in the company from medium-size to a very large company, and that was a challenge at the time,” he says. “After four-or-five years of working on megaprojects, we now want to look at a different market.

Megaprojects are exciting, you see the end result of the stadium or the metro, but the risks are huge because they’re all design and build projects with major challenges in terms of controlling your costs.”

Regardless of the type of project, or the scale, it is being built to, JEC’s company culture remains a key differentiator.

“Our business is the business of people,” he says. “We employ approximately 400 engineers, and the quality of those people is very important. We employ people with experience and capabilities and graduates in large numbers who in time develop themselves into good elements of the company that can carry the culture of the company. Usually, successful companies are not new companies.

They’ve been around for a long time, created the culture.”

AlJaber Engineering sees it as its responsibility to invest in its people, giving them chances to develop themselves. The company offers employees the opportunity to take courses, or

even improve their university qualifications. Hadid proudly tells us of one recruit who now holds a PhD and manages four companies within the Group.

“It’s very gradual, it takes time, it takes a lot of screening and talking to people to guide them to work on themselves,” Hadid says.

LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

As well as investing in their people, Hadid is excited about the prospect of investing in Qatar as a whole, with an environment that he sees as rife with opportunity.

“We believe Qatar is full of opportunities. The North Fields expansion is a significant opportunity for us as a major contractor here with very strong electrical and mechanical capabilities. We can be involved in industrial projects from A-Z. That’s what we’re trying to promote with the major contractors here,” Hadid tells us. “All this will be built over the next five-to-seven years, so with that in the pipeline I’m not worried about the future.”

As a company that already has a proud portfolio behind it, Al Jaber Engineering is ready to grasp those opportunities as they come, in Qatar and beyond.

“We’ve been there before, we have the references,” Hadid says. “We also just started our first project in Oman. We’ve been trying to find a project outside Qatar for some time. We’ve found one funded by a jointventure company, so it’s funded

by Qatari money. We’re building a resort, they’re government property developers. It’s very exciting that we’ve started our first project outside Qatar and are looking for opportunities in Kuwait and Oman and think it will be very promising for the next five years.”

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