Workplaces · Girvan · 2024

William Grant & Sons, Girvan: a head office network rebuilt over a weekend

The offices at the Girvan distillery needed new network infrastructure and new furniture, and the business could not be off the air while it happened. Lairds took the cabling and the racks, worked alongside the furniture contractor, and had the building live for Monday morning.

Programme

One weekend, live on Monday

The building

William Grant & Sons is the independent, family-owned distiller behind Grant’s, Glenfiddich, The Balvenie and Hendrick’s. Its grain distillery at Girvan, on the Ayrshire coast, runs around the clock, and the offices there are the working head office for the site: open-plan floors, meeting rooms and the people who run it.

The office floors were being refitted. New furniture was going in, the desks were moving, and the network infrastructure was being replaced at the same time rather than patched round. The brief to Lairds was the infrastructure: new structured cabling to every desk position and meeting room, new cabinets and patching, tidy and labelled, designed so that future moves and changes can be made at the patch panel rather than in the ceiling.

The constraint was time. A head office cannot close for a fortnight while its floors are recabled, so the work was planned for a single weekend, with the furniture contractor on site at the same time and the floors handed back before staff arrived on Monday. Lairds had already worked on the Girvan site at the Hendrick’s Gin Palace, which meant the site rules, the people and the way the estate runs were already familiar.

What we did

The design work happened before the weekend. We surveyed the floors with the new furniture layout in hand, counted outlets against desk positions rather than against the old plan, and set the containment and cabinet positions so that cable runs stayed within their limits with room to add. Every outlet, patch panel port and cable was given its label on the drawing before anything was pulled, which is what makes a weekend installation possible: nobody on site is deciding anything, they are building what is drawn.

Over the weekend our engineers pulled the new cabling in the ceiling voids and risers, dressed it into the cabinets, terminated and tested every link, and patched the floors through to the client’s switches. The furniture team from Rakkaus Furniture of Kilmarnock were installing desks and pods on the same floors at the same time, so the two programmes were sequenced room by room: cabling ahead of the furniture where the floor boxes and desk outlets needed to be in place, and behind it where the desks were feeding the last connections. That coordination was ours to manage, and it was adjusted through the weekend as each floor came together.

Not everything on the drawing survived contact with the building. Routes had to change where the ceiling would not give them up, and a few outlets moved with the desks. Those decisions were made on site and recorded as they were made, so that what was handed over matches what is in the ceiling rather than what was intended.

On site over the weekend

What went in

• Structured cabling to every desk position and meeting room, on new containment
• Network cabinets with patch panels and cable management
• Termination, testing and labelling of every link
• Patching of all floors through to the client’s switches
• Labelling and records for the client’s IT team
• Coordination with Rakkaus Furniture on site through the weekend

The Killie Community

AV for the charity partner of Kilmarnock FC

Refitting an office without closing it?

Network infrastructure is the part of a refit nobody sees and everybody depends on. If your floors are being refitted, or the cabling has reached the end of its useful life, we will survey the building, draw the installation and tell you what can be done in a weekend.