We have the honour of creating great things - Gergely Visy Engineer of the Month

How did you get STRABAG?

My father is a civil engineer. I wanted to follow in his footsteps, but it was on his advice that I applied to architecture school. As a professional, he told me that with this qualification I could become both a civil engineer and a design engineer. It was nice to have a wider choice, but I never became a designer. I didn't design my own house, but colleagues who I knew were really talented at it - I'm not good at it. So, although I graduated as an architect from the Budapest University of Technology in 2002, I never worked as an architect.

It is a special honour for me, even because of my qualification, that I was recently awarded a civil engineering prize by the Hungarian Chamber of Engineers.

I started my career at Magyar Építő, and after a year I joined Heros. I worked there for six years and progressed quite quickly to the position of site manager and then chief engineer. From there I moved to STRABAG in 2009 - 15 years ago this April 1st.

I spent the first 2 years in other areas of the company, then I moved to the area of large project construction, led by Álmos Becsky. Here, we mainly deal with industrial facilities, as STRABAG has a lot of facilities in this area, from a special civil engineering department to a prefabrication plant and a large in-house road, utility and structural engineering capacity. We also build public buildings, of course, in addition to industrial halls, which is how we were able to work on the OMRRK as part of the Liget Budapest Project, where I was project manager.

As a general project manager, my responsibilities range from subcontractor selection to client liaison and construction management, including work organisation, liaison and communication with project participants. This is why I spend most of my time on project sites.

What memorable projects have you worked on?

Perhaps my biggest and most complex task is the OMRRK. It did not belong to me, but the civil engineering tasks were also huge (building a four-storey basement with a slotted wall), while we took over from level -1. The main elements of the project, besides the central building, were two listed hospital buildings that were renovated. The main building had to meet very stringent requirements in terms of temperature, humidity or even air pressure in the storage rooms of the main building, and also had to provide a high degree of flexibility in the parameters. I believe that the precast reinforced concrete façade, which could be produced by the STRABAG prefabrication plant, is unique as a building.

The entire unisplayed collection of the Museum of Ethnography, the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts is stored underground in the artefact storage and restoration centre. In total, almost 40,000 square metres have been installed, a truly complex and intricate operation. Although the Liget Budapest Project is on the periphery, a less spectacular element of the project, it is an important building.

My other projects are mostly industrial: a tyre factory, a car parts factory, a car factory or a pump factory; and now I'm building a pasta factory. They are puritanical tin cans on the outside, none of them particularly stand out, but all of them have a technical beauty that makes me remember them fondly. From an engineering point of view, each one is different and each one has a different speciality.

How does Vajda-Paper fit into your work?

You could say it's just a box on the outside - but the outer shell is a very serious feat of engineering. In general, sandwich panel or trapezoidal sheet-clad halls with industrial floors are built today. There may be one or two shafts, a few multi-storey sections, but they are still almost schematic: just put in the production lines and you're done. Of course, the great advantage of this solution is that it creates buildings that can be flexibly rearranged and used for other functions. But a paper mill is not like that at all.

It is a bound, very strict technology, not even a small part of which can be used for anything other than paper production. A paper-making machine is a huge piece of equipment weighing hundreds of tons.

Such a factory building is built around the machine, as the machine components would not even fit into the finished building.

So one of the biggest challenges here was the ongoing collaboration with the machine manufacturer. The Italian company Toscotec specifically manufactures and assembles paper machines, and the whole building was designed around their machine, from the civil engineering to the end slab. A good example of this is that the frame structure is built from a six-metre grid, but there is a 7.5-metre section because the largest seven-metre part of the machine has to be supplied afterwards. If it needs to be replaced - very rarely, of course - it can only be taken out of the building in this way.

The base of the building is a huge pile-supported, pile-supported machine pile, surrounded by robust reinforced concrete structures; with a good thick base plate and a heavy-duty reinforced concrete slab. The machine is supported by two reinforced concrete beams, in which

The ironwork was so dense that the machine's bolts could not even fit between them, so the reinforcing bars had to be statically recalculated one by one to make sure they would fit.

We have encountered many similar problems to be solved on the ground. An Austrian-based engineering company, BHM Ingenieure, was also involved in the organisation and implementation of the project, and they delegated a project manager specialised in paper mills, Mr Uwe Danzinger. He not only knows the details of the building, but also the paper making machinery, so his involvement was a key element in coordinating the workflow. Communication with him was in German and with his Italian and Polish colleagues in English.

How many people are responsible for the work on a construction site?

I can only speak in general terms, because the details always vary depending on the size of the job and the workload of colleagues. Typically, my team consists of 10-15 people. They are directly managed by me and are joined by colleagues who come to the project from other departments within the company - structural, road, civil or utility engineers. Indirectly, on a project as big as Vajda-Papier, 250-270 people are working at the same time.

As a technical manager, although I do not directly manage them, I am responsible for their work and safety. Of course, for example, at OMRRK there were times when 500 people were working at the same time.

So the real difficulty is managing people?

It is often said that the proportion of engineering in our work is decreasing and the proportion of psychology is increasing. With a little exaggeration, one sometimes feels that this part is now 10/90. So I try to gather colleagues with whom I can work in the long term. In that respect, I think I am flexible because I try not only to select the best and most talented people, but also to find what they do best, what their strengths are and to guide them towards that.

I'm not looking for their mistakes, I'm looking at how they can succeed at their level and I'm looking for the task for them.

Of course, the success of a project does not depend only on your colleagues. We also use systems to make complex tasks as smooth as possible. We often work with STRABAG's Lean experts and know the methods. We select projects according to what provides us with the most effective support for a given task.

In my field, the biggest help is typically the pull schedule, where colleagues work with subcontractors to prepare daily, weekly and monthly schedules, and these are always available to all participants.

Each subcontractor is marked with a different colour and if a worker on site is not clear about something; maybe they want to know when a process is due for completion, they just look at the markings for their colour and they're in the picture.

It is really useful that this system is simple, transparent and easy to use. In addition, Lean workplace cleanliness and tidiness, separation of material storage and precise mapping of traffic routes are all implemented; all of which significantly speed up construction - not to mention workplace safety. In a similar way, the BIM is part of our daily routine, used not only for planning but also, for example, for invoicing at the Vajda-Paper construction site. It was very useful for verifying deliverables.

What are the points of joy in each project?

At Vajda-Papier's mill, it was the moment when the paper machine was started up. We ourselves had our doubts about the timeframe, but along the way we saw that we had assembled a team that could really achieve the goal - and we did.

The plane started when it was supposed to, which was a special moment for everyone.

I would also like to mention our Japanese partner Tsuchiya Hungary Kft., with whom I have had the opportunity to work several times. This team of engineers prepares projects for Japanese investors, and we have had the opportunity to design and build projects for them, which they have won and coordinated, as general contractors in our previous collaborations. There are great successes to be achieved in this collaboration and a lot to be learned from the projects - not only about the construction elements, but also about the cooperation of different cultures.

We have worked together on several projects, building a particulate filter factory for diesel engines in Dunavarsány around 2012-13, and then in 2020 the Makita warehouse in Székesfehérvár. This was built during the most difficult period for COVID and was completed well ahead of schedule.

It wasn't a special building, but I still think of it fondly because we were able to work with a memorably good cooperation, a knowledgeable client and a professional team.

We are now building a new factory for Nissin Foods. The only European factory of one of the world's largest instant noodle soups companies is in Kecskemét. In our previous cooperation, two years ago, a colleague of mine built a new warehouse for the customer. Now we are building an additional warehouse and two new ones on top of their three existing production lines, so that production cannot stop for a single minute, and we have to build between the production area and the warehouses.

So overall, why is it good to be an engineer?

We have the joy of creation, the honour of creating great things, which is a huge challenge, but I recommend it to everyone. At the end of the builds, success is literally tangible for us, which is a particularly good feeling.