belcom

Hammerson has been creating and managing some of the most exciting retail destinations and office buildings in Europe for over 50 years. A FTSE 100 company with a real estate portfolio in the UK and France of around £4.7 billion, Hammerson has investments in 14 major shopping centres and 18 retail parks providing a total of 1.3 million metre sq (msq) of retail space.

Union Square in Aberdeen city centre, which opened on October 29th 2009, is Hammerson’s latest retail and leisure development. It is the newest and largest shopping and leisure destination in Scotland and 80% of the 65,000 msq of the retail space is already let.

Hammerson uses state-of-the-art technology to provide communications services to each retail unit. This technology is also designed to enhance the shopping and leisure experience by for example replacing public tannoy announcements with in-store messaging.

The Challenge

125 retail units, varying in size from 25 msq to 2000 msq needed to be equipped with IP phones, flat screens and multiple data outlets in 4 weeks. Over 12,000m of CAT6E structured cabling needed to be installed and concealed to connect each retail unit to the communications backbone.

The installation work needed to be coordinated with shopfitters and retail managers who were working round the clock to be ready for business on October 29th.

Hammerson turned to belcom247 to provide the service since we had demonstrated in previous projects that we understood the requirements perfectly and could get the job done.

Belcom clearly has the knowledge and experience to meet the customer requirements. We use the highest quality materials and workmanship backed up by 25 year warranties.

What We Did

The key to this job was contingency planning. We knew we would be faced with units which weren't ready, sales managers who wanted to deviate from drawings, shopfitters who didn't want us in the way and a customer who had a hard, unmissable deadline. We worked in a POD system by allocating a group of retail units in close proximity to each 3 person team. Each team was equipped with the materials and tools for the entire group. If there was a genuine reason not to start or complete work in a particular retail unit, the team could easily move to another unit with disrupting continuity. By tracking progress on a daily basis, we ensured that we always stayed on target and finished on time.