CSi Thabile Lays High Speed Data Infrastructure for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital SANDTON, 17TH JULY 2015

CSi Thabile Networking Solutions (PTY) Ltd, a company that was established 34 years ago in 1981 has earned its reputation as a leader in building high speed IT network infrastructure. Its superior expertise in relocating, upgrading, enhancing or establishing data centre environments or network infrastructure is well-known. CSi Thabile was recently awarded the tender to do the IT infrastructure for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital where the main contractor is Group 5. CSi Thabile is a company at the cutting edge of leading innovative technologies, and is certified on all premier products on the market and remains committed to providing service excellence, and to delivering on time, every time.

Group Five was awarded the R400million contract to help make former President Nelson Mandela’s “lasting wish”, the construction of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital, in Parktown, a reality. The hospital will cater for all medical purposes and would have about 240 beds and eight operating theatres. The hospital is also expected to employ around 150 doctors and 451 paediatric nursing professionals.

Construction Insight met up with CSI Thabile’s Sales and Marketing Director, Mark Cheketri, who highlighted a number of issues regarding technology, experience and service delivery on this project and the philosophy of the company in undertaking various projects and maintaining their clients.

TECHNOLOGY

Cheketri highlighted that, “The Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital will basically have two server rooms, running OM 4 high speed fibre backbone between multiple cabinets throughout the hospital; and CAT 6A, copper cabling to remote ends. This is a leading edge technology that has been adopted by the Hospital. The request was for high speed and that is exactly what the hospital is going for.”

DELIVERY

With over 30 years of existence, CSi Thabile has the experience to undertake this kind of work as “we are registered and certified installers for the products used”. According to Cheketri, “To be able to tender on projects requiring these products you should have the OEM certification to design and install the product. CSi Thabile is in the fortunate position of being certified for design and installation of all premier products. The data cabling has to be done in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications, ISO 11801 and other international and local regulations”.

“Time is always an issue because the pressure is always on us to deliver. We generally follow the electrical contractors because they do the routing and wire ways. We loom the cables on or off site and lay them through the wire ways. So, if the routing has not been installed, we cannot proceed with the installation”.

Cheketri went on to explain that, “It is vital that we apply the correct standards, because routes and ceilings are generally closed as soon as we have completed each section, and any faults may require re opening of ceilings and stripping of looms. This in itself could cause delays and wasted labour. If the entire installation has been done and certified, the extended warranty gets issued, and the installation could run without any failures for many years as long as there is no physical abuse, the cable will work”.

EMPLOYEES ON SITE

In terms of the number of employees CSi Thabile send to site, “that depends on how far we are behind the electrical contractor. If we are right behind the electrical contractor we can have from 3 to 6 technicians’ on site; if we do let the electrical contractor get ahead of us we can send up to 20 or 25 technicians to site. What we don’t want to do is to have our teams standing around waiting for other contractors or the client. This means that we have to attend the site meetings and plan; we have a project management team that stays on site and plans based on the site progress to ensure that we are on course and that we don’t run out of resources or materials on site”.

CERTIFICATION AND WARRANTY

“Working on site does have its own challenges but we try to minimize that by doing most of the prep work accurately at the office. At the end of the installation, we ensure that everything gets checked, labelled and recertified; as the drawings are produced with all of the points marked on the drawings. That is then handed to the client, and the equipment manufacturer who then has to go out and certify the work so that he can issue the extended warranty. The extended warranty can only be issued once the work has been inspected and certified by the manufacturer. CSI Thabile generally does not have a problem with this; we do the job, they go and test it, and we get the extended warranty. Doing the installation to the satisfaction of the consultants, product manufacturer and the client always ends well.