We celebrated the placing of the first pile for the new cold store building at the MSD site in Haarlem, Netherlands. Following the Dutch tradition of ‘Eerste Paal’ the event marks the beginning of the construction phase of the project.
The project is being delivered by John Sisk & Son providing a full turnkey project delivery from concept to commissioning. Sisk has worked with their design partners, Arup and RKD to deliver the front-end concept and design. Arup provided support to Sisk in design management, multidisciplinary engineering and specialist consultancy, with RKD Architects providing full architectural services.
The project has been developed as an innovative model in “construction led execution” from concept through design, execution, commissioning and turnover with the aim of delivering greater efficiency throughout and maintaining focus on the target value and final project outcome.
This has been enabled by Sisk leading the turnkey approach and with the proactive collaboration of the design team and Sisk’s early engagement with its key construction partners, Akor and Jones Engineering along with several other Dutch partners. Key to this has been the virtual build in advance that we have done through digital design and other techniques we have used to drive Lean delivery.
MSD is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world renowned for their discoveries and advances in vaccines. MSD established their presence in the Netherlands in 1950's. The site at Haarlem has global significance as the distribution hub for 2,500 SKUs to more than 140 countries.
