By bringing design, engineering, MEP and construction teams under one organization, Meraki establishes a collaborative environment from the earliest stages of project development. Instead of working through multiple external consultants and subcontractors, key stakeholders are aligned from the outset, enabling faster decision-making and stronger project outcomes.
Winston Klint, Chief Operating Officer of Meraki Integrated Contracting, Meraki Group
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Winston Klint, Chief Operating Officer of Meraki Integrated Contracting, Meraki Group, explores how vertically integrated teams are helping bridge the gap between design intent and execution
Ask any contractor what actually derails a construction schedule and the answer rarely involves the parts of a building anyone can see.
It’s the ducts, cables and pipework hidden above the ceiling that tend to cause the real headaches, and the decisions that determine whether those systems fit together neatly are made months, sometimes years, before anyone sets foot on site.
Get that groundwork wrong and the fallout shows up later as clashes, rework and slipping deadlines. A growing number of developers think they have found a way round the problem, and it starts with who is in the room when the early decisions get made.
Meraki Group is one of them. Rather than farming design, engineering, MEP and construction out to a rotating cast of consultants and subcontractors, the group keeps all four functions in-house.
“When every discipline is sitting at the same table from day one, service requirements stop being an afterthought and become part of the design itself,” says Winston Klint, Meraki’s Group’s chief operating officer.
It sounds like a simple shift, but in practice it changes almost everything about how a project unfolds.
Start with the design stage, where the advantage is arguably most visible. When MEP engineers are in the conversation alongside architects and structural teams from day one, rather than reviewing drawings after the fact, services get designed into the building instead of squeezed in around it.
Systems can be chosen with the available floor area already in mind, clashes get caught on screen instead of on site, and the routes that pipework and cabling will eventually take are mapped out with a precision that is hard to achieve once trades are working in silos.
That same logic carries through to a less glamorous but equally consequential stage, builder’s work coordination, where civil and MEP activity have to line up almost to the millimetre.
Sleeve locations, shaft requirements and slab openings all have to be agreed before concrete gets poured, and this is traditionally where projects lose time, as datum points get passed between subcontractors who are not always working from the same page, literally.
Under one accountable team that handover simply does not happen the same way. “A design change that surfaces three months into construction is expensive. The same change surfacing three months before it is just an update,” says Klint.
The savings compound from there because coordination happens earlier, engineering packages get finished sooner, which gives procurement teams room to lock in suppliers and materials well ahead of time, rather than scrambling when a late change forces a last-minute substitution.
Then there are the spaces nobody notices until something goes wrong with them, false ceilings and bathrooms chief among them, where ducts, pipes, fire protection and electrical containment are all fighting for the same few centimetres of space.
Klint describes the difference as one between a corridor ceiling with a clean, consistent line, and one stitched together from drawings that were never quite talking to each other. Kitchens and bathrooms benefit from the same early alignment of drainage, water supply, ventilation and electrics.
There’s also something harder to put a number on, which is speed of communication. Fewer parties means fewer approval chains, and problems that might once have taken days to resolve across four different companies can often be sorted in an afternoon when everyone works for the same one.
None of which makes vertical integration a magic fix. Bringing every discipline in-house concentrates risk as much as it concentrates control, and the model only works if the internal coordination is genuinely disciplined rather than assumed.
Still, as developers across the region face growing pressure to build faster without cutting corners, approaches that close the gap between design intent and site reality are likely to keep attracting attention. For Meraki Group, the bet is that the extra organisational complexity is worth it.
