Ever since it was founded in 1989, DRS have worked tirelessly to forge a level of trust between itself and its customers based on a combination of experience, technical capacity and reliability. From its headquarters in Santiago, Chile, the company delivers comprehensive building projects services and works that enables it to successfully manage a project from its initial design stages right through to commissioning. Specialising in construction projects, DRS has also become expert when it comes to ensuring energy efficiency and environmental protection.
“Over the course of nearly 25 years,” explains Administration and Finance Manager, José Manuel del Río, “we have steadily increased our market share, primarily in the construction sector from which we originated. At the same time we have invested considerable effort into developing our service offering to cater for other major industries. This has led to a situation where today we have clients operating in fields including telecommunications and the energy sector, and where we are now ourselves looking at mining related opportunities.”
For more than two decades DRS has married its technical capabilities and state-of-the-art equipment in order to expertly advise its clients on ways of creating the utmost added value to their projects, whilst always remaining flexible to their changing needs. Such qualities have led to the company today being responsible for implementing more than 3,000 projects in a wide range of fields, which have been estimated as being worth a total value of some US$7,000 million.
During the course of every project DRS implements a total management strategy that focuses on controlling numerous variables throughout a project’s life, including budget, quality, timeliness and safety. Quality and innovation meanwhile remain central pillars of DRS’ culture, with the company’s quality management system certified under ISO 9001 regulations.
“We believe that there are three main pillars to our business that have helped contribute to our success over the years,” del Río continues. “The first of these is innovation. It has always been the case that we are always looking for ways of using new technology and internal processes to better our service offering and our productivity.” It is this attitude that contributed greatly to DRS being presented with the Innovation Prize by the Chilean Construction Association (CCHC) in 2012.
“The second pillar,” del Río states, “is flexibility, and not just as it relates to our ability to successfully enter into new markets, but the way we can quickly and effectively cater for our customers’ changing needs. Last, but certainly not least, our success is a result of the work of our people. We realise they are our most important asset and as such we constantly put a great deal of focus on their development and training. One of the ways we do so is through an area of our business we call the DRS University. It is here that our most experienced employees are able to pass on their knowledge and experience to others within the organisation.”
Chile as a whole has been one of a select few countries to have experience relatively sustained growth in recent years, growing close to six percent in GDP terms in the last two years and with 2013 expected to see the country recording a further growth rate of more than four percent. These events have helped create a boom period for the construction sector, meanwhile, with interest rates now falling an economic climate is emerging that is steadily enticing foreign investment into the region.
“For our part we have been supporting the country’s growth in our own way by contributing to a host of major projects in crucial economic areas, from hospitals and schools to data centres, the latter of which is a highly skilled area of expertise in which we have completed some 37,000 square metres of projects to date,” del Río says.
Indeed, across Chile examples of DRS’ work and expertise can be found throughout a number of industry sectors, from retail and educational buildings to industrial and health care facilities. The latter is obviously one area of great importance for Chile and its population, and DRS have played a hugely important role in taking numerous health care facilities from concept to creation.
Among its projects in this field are the Avansalud Clinic and the Tabancura Clinic, both in Santiago. The former was an expansion project of considerable scale and involved adding a further five underground levels and eight stories to the buildings existing two underground floors and six stories. With the expansion increasing the total area of the complex by 8,665 square metres to 27,229 square metres, the company was also required to carry out remodelling work to the existing building.
Elsewhere, DRS’ work is also helping contribute towards Chile’s future growth through the various services it provides to educational projects across the country. Beneficiaries of these services include the Catholic University of Chile, Institute Inacap, and schools such as San Benito and Mount Tabor.
When it comes to projects in the retail sector, DRS’ multi-disciplined team has been credited with assisting in the development of more than 800 commercial undertakings. These include projects on behalf of major clients such as D-&-S Saitec (Walmart Chile), Cencosud, Ripley, Mall Plaza and Sodimac, among many others. Espacio Urbano Viña Centro, the shopping mall brand from Walmart, was a project that saw the company involved in the management of five levels of the building and the creation of two underground car parking facilities, which saw DRS’ team working across nearly 85,000 square metres of space.
Aside from retail, residential, educational and health projects, DRS has also ventured into another area of expertise, that being the restoration of historical buildings, a line of work that is much newer to this part of the world than in Europe for instance. Nevertheless, it is one that is of increasing importance and one that DRS hopes to see continue to grow as a way of maintaining the past two-centuries of Chile’s architecture and its cultural patrimony.
When asked for his take on Chile’s ability to continue its remarkable path of expansion in the coming years, del Río highlights the fact that he sees the country’s growth as now exceeding the infrastructure present to support it. “As the country has prospered immigration rates have risen and thus the population of Chile is expanding. This is now driving the demand for all manner of services, from supermarkets to schools and hospitals. It also means that there are increasing opportunities for us to become involved in large infrastructure projects including airports, ports and highways. Meanwhile, we will continue to look beyond Chile into places where we feel we can develop our strengths and accomplish in other South American countries what we have here at home.”
Written by Will Daynes, research by Louisa Adcock
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