JADA Group / Sandals

JADA GROUP / SANDALS

BEACHFRONT LUXURY, ENVIRONMENTAL COMMITMENT

JADA GROUP / SANDALS

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

“WE HAVE A LONGSTANDING COMMITMENT TO ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN OUR RESORT AND TOURISM DEVELOPMENT OPERATIONS.”

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MATCH MADE IN

PARADISE Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to JADA Group’s Director, Paul Lewis, and Regional Business Development Manager, Mark Hodkinson, and Sandals Resorts International’s Jeremy Jones, Director, Corporate Services, about building the new Sandals Royal Barbados resort, protecting the environment, and contributing to the local economy.

JADA GROUP / SANDALS

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

“EACH OF OUR RESORTS HAS AN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGER WHO ENSURES THE FOOTPRINT FALLS UNDER THE LEVELS DEEMED APPROPRIATE BY EARTHCHECK.”

JADA Group is a Barbadian group of companies whose operations span all areas of construction. Specializing in Hospitality, Commercial, and high-end residential within the holiday home market, JADA combines over forty years of experience in the industry with comprehensive expertise in luxury developments. (See JADA Group’s previous feature in Sustainable

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Business Magazine in issue 05/16.) When Sandals Resorts International acquired its resort in St. Lawrence Gap, Barbados in 2014, and subsequently decided to build a new 222-room hotel, JADA Group were a natural fit for the project.

“When we started upgrading the resort, we quickly realized we needed to bring the physical plant up to standards,” says Jeremy

Jones, Director, Corporate Services at Sandals Resorts International. “We went out to tender, and JADA had a very competitive bid where everything was very open and transparent. When we worked with them, we found that they were able to come in a little ahead of schedule, and so when we started looking at a new development, we knew exactly what they were able to deliver on.”

have been appropriate nor fair of us not to include other smaller Barbadian construction enterprises as well,” says Mr. Lewis. “So we brought in other smaller construction companies, who are now very much involved in the project, in addition to subsidiaries of the Group. CEMIX and CEMIX Inc. are heavily involved in supply of materials, and stone and concrete. INFRA Equipment Rentals is supplying tower cranes, plant, supporting tools and equipment, as well as trucking.

Millworks Inc. are involved in the joinery.

Bjerkhamn Associates are doing all of the admin, the HR, the procurement, and logistics. This is very much a collective effort, and that’s what’s making this project a success.”

“When you walk the site and you look at the work taking place, you realize the quality of construction and management that goes into JADA’s contract services,” says Mr. Jones. “It has been a very successful collaboration so far. With the new development, we are going to be under obligation to ensure that these rooms are handed over and ready to welcome our clients in December. JADA

respect that, and understands the timeframe, and has been extremely professional. It is important to us that we localize the feel and flavor of the island in which we operate.

That’s why it’s better to use a local contractor like JADA. They know the land better than we would; they can interpret some of the island feel and flavor. Who better to guide you through the development than somebody who knows their way around the woods?”

CARIBBEAN COLLABORATION The biggest challenge for JADA Group was to bring together the required manpower to meet the demanding timeline. “Good construction artisans are heavily in demand,” explains Mr. Lewis. “We had to reach out to other Caribbean territories, with the support and approval of the Barbados Immigration Department. We’re proud to say now it isn’t only Barbadian workers and management who are building Sandals Barbados, but it’s a truly Caribbean project. We have nationals from Guyana, Jamaica, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Grenada, India, and Colombia. We’ve

“We were in competition against large external International companies ,” says Paul Lewis, Director of JADA Group. “We’re the largest construction group with a development arm on the island, and we had to pull all of our companies together and get them to understand that, because of the margins we faced, we needed to make a collective effort to get the price right and make sure all the supporting services were in place.”

“We went through a lengthy process of demonstrating that JADA was not just JADA Builders as a contractor,” explains Mark Hodkinson, Regional Business Development Manager at JADA Group. “We have a lot of facets to the business which add depth, and can add value in the construction process. We were able to show them we had the ability to deliver, and we were able to meet the competing companies on price.”

SHARING THE WEALTH Once JADA had secured the contract, they decided to share some of the gains with other Barbadian companies. “It would not JADA GROUP / SANDALS

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

recruited specialty labor, mostly carpenters, masons, and tilers, who are staying to do the project until November this year.”

This influx of foreign workers led to some unusual logistical challenges. “As part of the immigration approval, we built a complete facility to provide housing for these persons,” says Mr. Lewis. “This was in the north of the island, as an extension of a preexisting dorm we have at our main office.

But Sandals is in the south. So we established contracts with local public transportation vehicles to transport these guys north to south and then back again at the end of the day. We were also notified by the local

commercial banking sector that they were getting inundated with these workers, causing long lines. We arranged to bring banking staff onto our site, supported by the HR department, to help the workers open bank accounts so they could access their wages by automatic tellers. These are non-traditional issues, but with the size of the project and the restrictive timeline, we had to hit the ground running and work along with Sandals to find solutions as we went along.”

FAST AND FURIOUS Six days after JADA were awarded the contract, they began work. “This is very unusu-

al,” says Mr. Hodkinson. “Normally there’s a mobilization period of four to six weeks on a project of this size. We tendered the work and priced up to a certain point, then we actually started before the final five packages had been finalized and added to the works. We’ve learned a lot as a company, and we were able to come up with ways to use the resources Barbados has to offer in a productive way.”

“We’re very proud that with the time constraints on this project, we embraced a new technology,” says Mr. Lewis. “In terms of document control, we abandoned the old, time-proven method of accessing

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

drawings and the ton of paperwork that normally follows that. Instead we introduced for Sandals a full paperless document management control system called Procore. This was born out of necessity, to come up with an inventive approach to save time and resources. Procore means the guys in the field automatically have updated drawings available to them as they are issued, as opposed to having all of these extra drawings, and having to run back to the office to collect them.”

“As long as you have WiFi access on the site, everything’s in real time on one portal,” says Mr. Hodkinson. “It means you can review a detail in real time, identify a problem, mark up the drawing, and issue it to the team, all seamlessly. It’s been a tremendous benefit in terms of efficiency.”

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Sandals Resorts International was one of the first all-inclusive resorts in the world to receive Green Globe 21 environmental

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certification, through their Sandals Negril resort in 1998. “We have a longstanding commitment to environmental sustainability in our resort and tourism development operations,” says Mr. Jones. “We remain acutely aware that we have an environmental responsibility, and this is implemented through our Sandals Earthguard program.

Each of our resorts has an environmental, health and safety manager who ensures the footprint falls under the levels deemed appropriate by EarthCheck.”

Water scarcity is a particular issue in the Caribbean, and Sandals focuses on eliminating water waste. “We reuse gray water for irrigation, and install low flush and altered flush toilets,” says Mr. Jones. “We have low-flow showerheads, aerators, and flow restrictors in taps, as well as a towel reuse policy, which saves a huge amount of water. In terms of construction, when you clear a site, there’s always going to be a loss of some of the plant life. But we have a massive replant program, and we don’t

slash and burn; instead, we reuse. When you walk into the restaurant in the main building, we used the mahogany from the existing resort which we modified.”

“The air conditioning for this project is all serviced by a central chilled water system,” says Mr. Hodkinson. “These kinds of systems tend to be far more efficient than running separate stand-alone air conditioning units for each room, and that will reduce the energy demand. We have a huge water cistern for harvesting water for irrigation, which is under the entire tennis court, and cisterns underneath C-block and D-block. There’s LED lighting to reduce power load. Sandals recognize that the benefits are twofold, both in terms of reducing costs, and also placing less strain on the natural resources.”

LOCAL FLAVOR Sandals also tries to contribute to the preservation and protection of local wildlife.

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

have resorts, including Barbados, there are turtle nesting sites,” says Mr. Jones. “We fence those areas off, because already only one in about 300 hatched turtles stand a chance of making it back into the water. So we try to decrease the odds, and protect these turtles once they’re out of the nest going back into the water. Whenever there’s a hatching taking place, we invite the guests to photograph it and share it on social media. There is also the invasive lionfish, which is starting to populate waters in the Caribbean. They can cripple

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or kill just about anything else in the water, and they’re harming a lot of the indigenous species. But if you catch them, the meat is very fleshy, and it comes out really well on a grill. Sandals has put a lionfish cookbook in place, and our chefs will buy lionfish if fishermen catch them and bring them in, to incentivize this.”

Sandals emphasizes local produce and supports local farmers. “Barbados has a strong agricultural program, and we’re able to source a lot of the fruits and vegetables from the farm to the table,”

says Mr. Jones. “That puts cash flow and investment into the local economy. The local farmers, the local tour operators, and the local taxi drivers all benefit from this type of development. Then there’s our Sandals Foundation, which has three specific pillars: Community outreach, education, and environment. We sponsor events for schools and sporting events, and we have a youth camp. We’re providing free dental and eyecare clinics for thousands of Caribbean nationals, not only in Barbados but throughout the entire region. We also

THE PROJECT HAS ALLOWED JADA TO DEEPEN THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER BARBADIAN CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES.

host a weekly Barbados day on the property, and during that day local vendors get a chance to come onsite with craft items for sale. For those customers who don’t want to go on tours and excursions to go shopping, we’re actually going to bring the vendors on resort to be able to sell localized crafts to them. The visitors love it, and it allows us to spread some earnings into the local economy.”

COOPERATION AND COMPROMISE “One of the challenges of the project and our contract obligations was the working

time restrictions,” says Mr. Hodkinson. “Sandals has a fully operational hotel next door, and we’re trying to minimize the impact to their guests from dust and noise. That’s not always easy to do when you’re working to a tight timeline. So we tried to ensure that noisier activities like drilling and jackhammering are pushed later on in the day. We also installed a high dust catcher fence, which is at least four stories. Sandals have been great, and they’ve worked with us in certain areas in the interest of our common goal, which is getting the project finished for the end of November.”

“A lot of the foreign workers have come to Barbados, and they expect to work as soon as the sun rises and to work well past sunset, in order to make more money for themselves and to provide remittances to their loved ones,” says Mr. Lewis. “The time restrictions were a challenge in terms of motivating this regional workforce, where they wanted to start work at 7:00 and there were sections where we couldn’t start until 8:30, and then they had to finish early in the evening. A lot of the foreign workers were ready to pack their bags and go back home.

But Sandals worked with us, and allowed

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

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JADA GROUP / SANDALS

us to pull back the start time to 7:30, which helped a lot. We were very impressed by that level of cooperation.”

ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY With over 700 workers on one construction site, all of various nationalities, health and safety was a challenge for JADA. “I’m proud to say that enforcement of our policies has been successful,” says Mr. Lewis. “We’ve had very few incidents or accidents, and those we’ve had have been small in nature. In this project, we have enforced a zero-tolerance policy for health and safety. If we find anyone working without personal safety equipment,

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they are escorted off the site, and they’re not permitted to come back without appropriate equipment.”

“This approach has been very successful,” says Mr. Hodkinson. “It’s also something we want to build on. As we move forward as a company and work with international entities like Sandals, we want to make sure that we’re in a position to satisfy clients that our standards meet their requirements.”

“Clients look for companies who can self-regulate,” says Mr. Lewis. “You can’t just depend on an ISO rating. You must be able to demonstrate that you have homegrown policies and that you support those policies in the field.”

SOLID PARTNERSHIPS The project has allowed JADA to deepen their relationships with other Barbadian construction companies. “These relationships have grown and been strengthened, and this will lead to future cooperation both locally and regionally,” says Mr. Lewis. “The exercise with Sandals has been a very strong learning experience for us. We’ve come to understand what their expectations of value in a project are, and we’re trying to build that relationship with them, perhaps in the future to partner on other projects.”

“It’s been a rapid learning curve for a lot of the people working on the project,”

explains Mr. Hodkinson. “It’s taking people from a 50 mile an hour pace to 150 miles an hour, because this is the sharp end of the commercial side of regional construction. So we’ve all worked closely together, and we’ve made sure we can give other entities support wherever we can and assistance wherever needed. It has been a very productive collaboration between ourselves and the local subcontractors and specialists.”

“At the end of it all, we will all have raised our standards in terms of being able to produce a quality product under immense deadline-imposed pressure,” says Mr. Lewis.

“And similarly that knock-on effect will benefit these other companies who have been included in the construction work.”

DEVELOPING FURTHER Currently, Sandals is looking into another development in Barbados, the introduction of a Beaches Resort. “We’ve got to make sure we get this one open first, and start paying the bills,” says Mr. Jones. “But when it comes to that Beaches development, with the track record that JADA has, I have no doubt that they’d be one of the contractors that are going to be leading in the bidding process.”

“The proudest thing for us has been the opportunity to extend this project to other entities in the island in a soft economy,” says Mr. Lewis. “We’ve been able to share our good fortune, and we’ve been able to show everyone what great Barbadian enterprise is capable of achieving.”

“To put it into perspective, the project directly employed over 700 staff and artisans,” says Mr. Hodkinson. “That’s not including the indirect work going on offsite.

So it’s been a massive boost to the economy at a time when the market’s been soft, and as a consequence this has proved extremely valuable to all the entities involved.” c

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JADA Group Spring Hall, St. Lucy Barbados, West, Indies.

T: +1 246 439-9242 www.jadagroup.com

Sandals Barbabos T: +1 888 726 3257 www.sandals.com

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