How Aletlala digitized 50+ projects with ORKSTRA

Aletlala General Contracting has been building in Abu Dhabi for years. By early 2025, they were running 50+ active projects, employing hundreds of staff across sites and offices, and — like most contractors their size in the GCC — running operations on a patchwork of tools that didn't talk to each other.

This is the story of how they replaced four disconnected systems with one platform, in their own language, and what it actually changed.

The "before" snapshot

In April 2025, Aletlala's operational stack looked like this:

• Tender management: shared Excel files in a OneDrive folder. The tender register was a single workbook that whoever was free updated.
• BOQ pricing: more Excel — one workbook per tender, with rates copied across by hand from supplier quotations.
• Project execution: WhatsApp groups per project. Site engineers posted progress photos that disappeared into chat history.
• Quality and HSE: paper checklists. Inspectors carried clipboards. Photos went into a foreman's phone gallery and stayed there.
• Accounting: a generic accounting package with no awareness of construction (no IPCs, no retentions, no VO contract value impact).

Each of these tools made local sense. Together they produced a familiar GCC contracting headache: nobody had the full picture of any project at any moment.

The KPI numbers tell the story:

| Metric | April 2025 | |---|---| | Tender turnaround time (invitation to submission) | 14 days average | | IPC cycle (measurement to certification) | 21 days average | | Daily reports filed by foremen | ~40% of expected | | Outstanding RFIs > 14 days old | 30+ at any given time | | Material write-off at project close | ~5% of total spend |

The decision

The trigger was an IPC dispute. Aletlala had submitted IPC #4 on a mid-size villa project, and the consultant had rejected several measurements citing missing as-built evidence. Re-substantiating those measurements took two weeks of digging through three different WhatsApp groups, two engineers' phones, and a paper file in the site office. The IPC was eventually approved — but at lower value than originally claimed.

That kind of loss is invisible until you sum it up. When Aletlala did, they decided the operational debt was no longer worth carrying.

The brief for what would become ORKSTRA was specific:

1. Arabic-first. Site staff would not learn an English app.
2. One platform. Tender → project → IPC → handover, with no exports between modules.
3. Real construction primitives. BOQ items, IPCs, VOs, retentions, subcontract liabilities.
4. Built around the GCC reality. UAE VAT and Corporate Tax. WPS payroll. FIDIC contract structure.

The rollout

ORKSTRA went live at Aletlala on a single project first — a 4-tower residential development in Abu Dhabi — in June 2025. The pilot took six weeks:

• Week 1–2: tenant setup, user provisioning, RBAC for the 30 initial users
• Week 2–3: BOQ import (the live Excel imported in 45 minutes; QA took another two days)
• Week 3–4: Quality module training for site inspectors; field WhatsApp bot rollout to 12 foremen
• Week 4–5: First IPC cycle on ORKSTRA (cycle time: 9 days, vs 21 historical)
• Week 5–6: VO module activated; first VO instructions captured digitally

By August 2025, ORKSTRA was rolled out to all 50+ active projects.

The "after" snapshot — six months later

These are the numbers as of November 2025:

| Metric | Before | After | |---|---|---| | Tender turnaround | 14 days | 6 days | | IPC cycle | 21 days | 4 days | | Daily reports filed | ~40% | ~95% | | Outstanding RFIs > 14 days | 30+ | 4 | | Material write-off at project close | ~5% | ~1.5% |

The IPC cycle drop alone — from 21 days to 4 — was worth more than the project's entire annual subscription cost in working capital released to the business.

What worked, what didn't

What worked surprisingly well:

• The WhatsApp field bot. We thought foremen would resist. They didn't — because we met them in WhatsApp, not in a new app.
• BOQ import. The Aletlala estimating team was the most skeptical group. They became the most enthusiastic users once they saw a 60-section BOQ parse in 45 seconds.
• Bilingual PDFs. Consultants stopped asking for re-formatted handover packs.

What needed iteration:

• Initial inspection checklist templates were too generic. Site QA teams rebuilt them per discipline; we shipped the customization feature within a month.
• The first VO pricing flow assumed all VOs were BOQ-rate-based. Reality is mixed (BOQ rates, day-works, lump sum). We added pricing method selection as a v1.1 feature.

The reusable lessons

If you're a UAE contractor considering a similar move:

1. Pilot one project first. Don't roll out everything everywhere on day one. The lessons you learn on project #1 save you weeks on projects #2 through #50.
2. Migrate the BOQ early. It's the spine of every other module. IPCs, cost control, VOs — all reference the BOQ. Get it right first.
3. Don't fight the channel. If your foremen are on WhatsApp, your field reporting belongs on WhatsApp. Forcing a new app produces empty reports, not better reports.
4. Measure before you start. The IPC cycle, the daily report rate, the write-off percentage — capture them before rollout. The improvement is the case for the next project's adoption.

Aletlala's transformation isn't unusual — it's repeatable. We're running similar pilots with three other GCC contractors as we write this.

If you want to talk about whether your operation looks like Aletlala's "before," start a conversation. We'll tell you honestly whether ORKSTRA is the right fit.

— Eng. Amr Shoieb