Blending over 40 years’ industry experience with a passion for innovation, EngDoc founders David Mullen and Tim King are staying ahead of the curve in terms of innovation, quality and training.

EngDoc was formed by David Mullen, a mechanical engineer with over 20 years in building services and Tim King, an environmental engineer and Managing Director of King Environmental Services, after identifying a demand in the industry for high quality engineering documentation, produced by engineers for engineers.

The USP offered by their service was that it included site attendance by qualified engineers to walk down and redline construction drawings and CAD services to update these to accurate ‘as built’ drawings. “We’re engineers,” states King. “We have an understanding of how things work on a site, and when we’re dealing with people, we understand what they are trying to do.”

Growth and Innovation

The business grew out of the Innovation Centre at IT Sligo, and achieved local recognition in 2008 as Sligo County Winner of the National Enterprise Awards. The following year, Engineering Documentation was selected as a winner of the Best Emerging New Business at the Small Firms Association (SFA) National Small Business Awards.

As the downturn began to affect the construction industry in the years that followed the company began to explore new solutions and efficiencies to bring to the market. “Rather than laying off people, we invested our resources in R&D—particularly in the use of digital technology and the newly emerging process of Building Information Modelling (BIM), which at the time was starting to become a buzz word within the industry,” Mullen recalls.

“We’ve been ahead of the curve or certainly on the curve for the last number of years—I don’t think the demand and the markets were there when we started implementing it,” he says. The majority of their work is abroad, in data centre projects across Scandinavia, the European continent and the United States, with another portion of the customer base coming  from small- to medium-sized contractors who would not have the capacity for this type of expertise in-house.

Another enhanced service which EngDoc added to their portfolio is point cloud scanning using 3D laser scanners, to take millimetre-accurate measurements from a site installation and replicate it in a virtual environment. They have also invested in drone technology to gather point cloud data from the air. The technology can also be used at the handover stage to validate the model and ensure that it accurately reflects what is handed over on site.

Audited for Quality

The company is constantly progressing and as it celebrates its 15 years in business, it recently achieved certification for ISO 19650:2018 for Building Information Modelling. “It’s a benchmark of quality for the organisation, underlining that we have the right people in the right roles, and that we’re doing the work to a particular standard,” says Mullen. “This new standard, in addition to our existing certifications for ISO 9001 (Quality), ISO 14001 (Environmental) and ISO 45001 (Occupational Health & Safety) demonstrates a dedication to professionalism within the company which we strive to carry through in all our work.”

EngDoc is also home to an Autodesk Authorised Training Centre (ATC) since 2016. This centre facilitates both internal and external training in Autodesk drawing products including AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks and BIM360. 

In tandem with this, the company recently launched a graduate training programme to take in recent graduates and school-leavers. “It is integral to what we’re doing,” Mullen says. “We were seeing people coming out of college with a gap between their level of skill and what’s expected in the industry in terms of practical drawing skills. We developed this eight-week training plan where new employees blend learning in our Training Centre with practical experience to help bridge the gap between education and the requirements of industry.”