13 kilometres of high-voltage cable doesn’t just lay itself.

Running that much cable across countryside and live public roads, while minimising public disruption, means a lot of planning before an excavator even breaks ground.

The Kilshane 220kV GIS substation near Dublin is being developed by specialist renewables contractor Adman. The project team needed to start coordinating the work months in advance of building work: road closures, work windows with local authorities, and noise restrictions, all before levelling ground, building blast walls, laying the cable, and pouring thousands of tons of reinforced concrete base work to cover it all.  

The substation will bring energy to support the growing, power-hungry data centres being built in the Dublin area. And the pressure that puts on the power grid is not small.

Dean Maguire is Adman’s Quality Manager, and he explains why projects like Kilshane are critical to making sure the demand for power can be met, without leaving local communities or the wider power grid exposed:

“Ireland’s a relatively small country, about the same size and population as New Zealand, but the number of data centres in Ireland dwarfs the total in New Zealand. The key to building these projects is to try and reassure the country that going forward, the power supply is there and the country will be less impacted environmentally.”

Ireland’s climate doesn’t make the physical work any easier; heavy civil work on wet ground gets messy. But on a major infrastructure job like Kilshane, the one thing that can’t afford to get messy is the project documentation. The job generates huge amounts of project data that require ongoing and seamless quality compliance. As the primary on-site coordinator, Dean and his team need to navigate and manage the daily chaos of a complex build that will take years to deliver. His day-to-day is about site visits, checking work against designs and standards, and giving the owner the confidence that what was commissioned is being built correctly.

But when data is scattered across several disconnected systems, like paper, emails, and spreadsheets, and without a single owner, piecing together the data is a major challenge. Infrastructure builds are complex, and scope and site elements often change as work progresses. Without a clear record of evidence, that ambiguity leaves Adman in a commercially exposed position that’s hard to defend. 

Reducing friction through work tracking

There’s a lot riding on getting the scope and the details right on complex infrastructure projects. By adopting Procore, Adman can keep its site-to-office data pipeline in good order and build commercial certainty that lets the team breathe more easily. 

All project data is stored in one place, not in five. Data is time-stamped and geo-located. Contract scopes are linked directly to evidence in one Common Data Environment (CDE) that enables everyone to work off the same real-time information. That gives the project team, whether on site or in the office, greater confidence that the work being delivered is being recorded as it happens. 

Using the tools in the CDE, the Adman team has actively stripped away admin chaos. The company’s senior contracts manager, Oisin Boyle, is under no illusion about how much harder that would be without Procore. 

“Now we have a system that means we can control drawings, submittals, and RFIs. That links us to the designers and to the clients so much quicker. It streamlines and keeps track of our information.”

Adman’s processes used to involve a lot of manual chasing and Dean has zero nostalgia for the old routine. 

“Everything was paper-based or a Word to Excel form. It was all saved on people's desktops and on different hubs. We had four or five different systems that we were able to amalgamate into one when we got Procore.”

As well as holding data centrally, Maguire can skip much of the on-site inspections, “It allows me to audit every site remotely for 90% of the things that have to be checked.”

With drawings, documents, and reports saved and accessible in one CDE, the project team can maintain a clear audit trail for decisions made on the Kilshane project. 

“It's a great way of capturing a lot of detail in one tool, like your photographs, files, drawings, and commentary. But mainly your approvals and your timestamps to make sure everybody knows how and when something was signed off.” 

The handover 

Most of what Adman builds at Kilshane disappears from view the moment it’s finished. But after nine years working at Adman, Oisin Boyle doesn’t find this discouraging. 

“It’s kind of funny because your most important work gets buried at the end of the day. But we’ve seen the work happen and at least we can go home knowing that we’ve made a difference.” 

For a critical infrastructure project like Kilshane, having a full record of how it was built helps instil confidence along the chain of accountability. “It means that everybody from a director to a contracts manager, down to an auditor, or a design team can see everything all at one time, and all provided with the right permissions,” says Maguire. “It's a real key element of making sure that everybody is working off of the latest and most accurate data.”  

By the time the substation is ready for planned handover to the Electricity Supply Board in 2027, Adman will hold an extensive body of project data designed to help support their position in the event of any pushback. 

“Multiple times there have been challenges over scope, or about how elements have been carried out on a site,” says Boyle. “It's been very easy for us to provide a photo report from the timestamped images that we have in Procore to demonstrate to the client that works have been completed in the correct manner." 

Having a defensible record is a powerful way to support commercial confidence on critical infrastructure projects. 

  • Are all site photos time-stamped, geo-located, and tied directly to the contract scope?

  • Can your quality managers conduct their site audits remotely?

  • Do you have a clear, centralised audit trail for your design changes and submittals? 

If the answer is ‘No’, your commercial position is exposed. Stop chasing paper and start taking control of your margins.

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