Case study · Residential construction
The decision gets made on site, or it doesn't get made.
Edgepoint Homes builds between 200 and 300 houses a year. Their site managers were the people who had to make the call, and they were the people with the least access to anything they needed to make it with.
50%
cut from IT running costs
200–300
homes built every year
2009
building in Melbourne's south-east since
5+ yrs
age of the hardware we replaced
The problem
A bloke standing in a half-built house, guessing.
Edgepoint is a residential builder in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs, going since 2009, with a genuine focus on design quality and on building houses efficiently. Efficiency is where the problem showed up.
Their site managers had no reliable way to get at vital information, and no reliable way to reach the office. So a question that should take two minutes turned into a drive back, a voicemail, or a decision made on memory and corrected later.
None of those are disasters on their own. Add them up across 200 to 300 builds a year and momentum quietly leaks out of every project on the books.
Meanwhile, back at the office, every piece of hardware in the business was more than five years old and the whole place needed better applications to work with.
What we did
Put the information where the decision gets made.
Everything else followed from that. The office work was necessary, but the job was really about the people standing in the mud.
On site
Laptops out, iPads in. Site managers had been carrying laptops, which on a building site is a device you use in the car. We swapped them for iPads running mobility applications, so the information came out of the ute and into the house being built.
Small change, and the one that moved the needle. Productivity on site went up because asking a question stopped being an event.
Back at the office
- A new server, replacing what was there
- Every piece of hardware over five years old replaced
- Better productivity applications across the business
And then the boring bit that saved the money
- A yearly Managed Service Agreement covering backup, ongoing support and help desk access
- We took over all future hardware procurement, so buying stopped being ad hoc
The outcome
Half the cost, and a budget that behaves.
50%
saved on cost
The headline number, and the one that got attention internally.
Site managers got faster
Productivity went up because the information was in their hands rather than at the other end of a phone call that wasn't being answered.
The budget stopped surprising anyone
With procurement and support under one agreement, Edgepoint could predict upcoming IT expenses instead of reacting to them. That turned out to matter as much as the saving.
Client feedback, and a caveat
The feedback recorded at the time was written up in the third person and was never attributed to a named person, so we're not going to present it as a quote from someone. Reported as it stands: the team at Edgepoint found Ginko efficient, friendly and reasonable, found our suggestions useful or worthwhile from a cost-saving point of view, felt we were part of their team, and said we responded quickly to their concerns including outside office hours.
Take that for what it is. An unattributed testimonial is worth less than a named one, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Read this before you judge the technology
This job is from around 2018, and it shows.
"We installed a new server and replaced the laptops with iPads" was a good answer in 2018. It is not a 2026 answer, and we're not going to pretend we did this last week.
We've left it on the site because the problem hasn't dated at all. Field staff who can't reach the information they need is still the single most common thing we get called about by builders. Only the tools have changed.
The relationship carried on afterwards, which is the part of a case study that's actually hard to fake.
Your site staff still ringing the office to get an answer?
We will look at what your field teams actually need to reach, what is stopping them, and what it costs to fix. You get the findings in writing whether you use us or not.