T4 Engineering: an M&E
contractor on one system.
T4 Engineering Group Ltd installs and maintains mechanical, electrical, security and fire safety systems in commercial and industrial buildings. Its maintenance, call-outs and certificates run on Unibuild: a web portal for the office and a phone app for every engineer.
Published by Unibuild · Updated · Sources
Plant rooms, fire doors
and the gate at the front.
T4 Engineering Group installs, services and repairs the engineering inside commercial and industrial buildings. Its engineers work across the North West and central England, and further afield when a client needs them.
Mechanical work covers ventilation, air handling, pumps, fans, motors and drives, with pipework fabricated and fitted on site and equipment stripped and overhauled off site. Electrical work covers fit-outs, distribution, lighting and EICR testing. Security work covers access control, automated doors and gates, barriers, ANPR and CCTV.
On the fire side, T4 seals service penetrations, fits and upgrades certified fire doorsets, surveys existing doors and carries out compartmentation and remedial work. Planned and reactive maintenance runs alongside all of it, from scheduled servicing to emergency call-outs.
Its published project shows the kind of site. At a manufacturing plant in Port Sunlight, T4 installed ductile iron effluent pipework to a consulting engineer’s design. The work ran under RAMS, confined space planning and lifting plans under LOLER and PUWER.
RailCore Infrastructure, the Liverpool rail contractor in its own case study, is part of the same group.
The work and the records it needs
- Mechanical
- Ventilation, pumps, fans, motors and pipework
- Electrical
- Installations, lighting and EICR testing
- Security
- Access control, gates, barriers and CCTV
- Fire
- Fire stopping, fire doors, smoke and fire systems
- Records
- Service sheets, certificates, RAMS and permits
Four problems maintenance
work puts on the office.
Each one is common to building services contractors, and each one usually lives in a spreadsheet and an inbox.
The service that slipped
A planned maintenance contract is a promise to visit every asset on time. Run from a spreadsheet, a missed service is found when the client’s auditor asks for it.
A call-out at four o’clock
A fault is reported by phone, passed to an engineer by text and invoiced weeks later. Nothing joins the three, so the client’s question about what was done takes a morning to answer.
Certificates that leave the building
EICRs, service reports, LOLER examinations and fire door records all go to the client. The client and their insurer want them on demand, and they usually sit in somebody’s email.
Hundreds of doors, one at a time
Each fire door needs its own survey, defects, remedial work and sign-off. On a spreadsheet, the door by the stair core on level three becomes a row nobody can match to the door.
A call-out, from
report to certificate.
Reactive work is where records usually go missing. On Unibuild the request, the visit, the photographs and the certificate are one record, opened by the client and closed by the engineer.
Plant rooms and stair cores often have no phone signal. The app keeps working there and sends everything when the phone is back in range. How the engineers’ app works.
The client raises it themselves.
The client raises a call-out request in their own portal. It reaches the office against that site, rather than as a voicemail.
The job goes to an engineer.
The live map shows which site each engineer scanned into today. The office sends the job to the right person, and it arrives on their phone as a notification.
Arrival, RAMS and permit first.
The engineer clocks in at the site and signs the RAMS on the phone. Where the work needs one, a safe isolation or confined space permit is completed before anything is touched.
A defect becomes a quotation.
Anything found beyond the call-out is photographed and quoted as remedial work. The client approves the quotation in the portal, and it becomes a job of its own.
The record is finished at the asset.
Photographs, test results and the engineer’s signature go on the record before the engineer leaves. The certificate is produced on the firm’s letterhead, and the client reads it in the portal.
Every asset, its schedule
and its history.
Planned maintenance runs from an asset register: every air handling unit, pump, board, gate and door on every client site.
Each asset carries its service schedule, with SFG20 schedules attached where they apply. Completing a visit records it against the asset and sets the next due date. Unibuild watches those dates every night and raises what is due and what has passed. How planned maintenance works.
The engineer corrects the register while standing in front of the unit, so the asset list stays true. Lifting equipment and pressure systems keep their LOLER and PSSR records on the same platform.
How a contract is arranged
- Client
- Each client, with its own sites
- Site
- Plant rooms, floors, doors and gates
- Asset
- Air handling units, pumps, boards and doors
- Schedule
- A service pattern and the next due date
- History
- Every visit, defect, photograph and certificate
Records that leave
the building.
These four are the records clients and their insurers ask for most.
Fire doors, door by door
Each door carries a label with its own QR code. The engineer scans it, the door opens with every earlier record, and the new one is completed at the door with photographs and a signature.
How the fire door register worksFire stopping, seal by seal
Each penetration is logged against the job, the level and the room, with its product, batch, installer, date and photographs. A remedial is raised against the original seal, so the history of that hole stays together.
How fire stopping is recordedElectrical certificates from the test results
EIC, EICR and Minor Works certificates are produced in the platform on the firm’s letterhead. Each sits with the job, the safe isolation permit and the test instrument with its calibration status.
How electrical certification worksThe client reads it themselves
Clients log into a portal in the firm’s own name and see their own sites only. They open certificates and service history, and see the qualifications of the engineers who attended.
How the client portal worksFrom inboxes and spreadsheets
to one record per asset.
| The usual way | At T4 |
|---|---|
| A maintenance schedule in a spreadsheet, checked when somebody remembers. | A schedule on every asset, with the next due date set by the last visit and watched every night. |
| A call-out taken by phone and passed on by text. | A request raised by the client in the portal and sent to an engineer’s phone. |
| A certificate written up in the office from notes taken on site. | A certificate completed at the asset, on the firm’s letterhead, signed on the phone. |
| A fire door survey on a spreadsheet, matched to doors by guesswork. | A labelled door with its own record, opened by scanning its QR code. |
| Certificates emailed to the client one at a time, on request. | Certificates the client opens in the portal, for their own sites only. |
The rest of T4,
on the same record.
One monthly figure covers every module and unlimited users. These six sit around the work above.
Where this came from.
These are Unibuild customers, written up by Unibuild. The public sources below cover who the businesses are; the account of the software is ours.