IT support for construction companies: depots, sites and a mobile workforce

Construction and plant hire businesses run from depots, yards, site cabins and vans rather than a single office. That shape changes what IT support needs to do: keep several locations on one secure network, get site staff online where there is no fixed line, and make sure the systems behind hire desks, job costing, CIS and payroll are available every day. This guide sets out the practical requirements.

Why construction is a different IT problem

A firm with a head office, three depots and half a dozen live sites has more locations than most businesses ten times its size. Each depot has a hire desk or workshop that stops trading when its connection drops. Each site office is temporary, often has no fixed line, and is staffed by people who need drawings, timesheets and email on a phone or tablet.

The finance team faces monthly deadlines that do not move: CIS returns by the 19th, payroll, VAT. And the sector has been a consistent target for invoice fraud, because subcontractor payments are large, frequent and often arranged by email.

Our IT support for construction and plant hire page describes how we support firms like this. The standards below apply whoever provides your IT.

Connecting depots and yards to head office

The core of a multi-location construction network is a site-to-site VPN from each depot back to head office or to a cloud hub, so that a hire desk in one depot uses the same systems, the same logins and the same files as the office. The building blocks are:

• A business-grade router or firewall at each depot with the VPN configured and monitored. When a depot drops off the network, someone should know before the depot manager rings.
• Wi-Fi that covers the yard and workshop, not just the office. Fitters checking kit against the hire system on a tablet need signal by the racking, and UniFi or similar managed access points make this affordable.
• Structured cabling done once, properly. Depot buildings are often converted industrial units and the cabling is an afterthought. Fibre between buildings on the same yard avoids the interference problems copper suffers near heavy plant.
• Failover. A depot that cannot hire out equipment because the broadband is down loses money by the hour. A 4G or 5G backup connection that cuts in automatically is cheap by comparison.

This is the pattern behind our work with Mr Plant Hire, a multi-depot plant and tool hire business headquartered in Enfield that Dig IT has supported for more than 15 years. Site-to-site VPNs, UniFi Wi-Fi at the branches, SharePoint for shared documents and centrally managed endpoints keep each depot working as part of one company. The Mr Plant Hire case study has the detail.

Getting site offices online

Site cabins rarely have a fixed line, and ordering one for a nine-month project usually means waiting for a large part of it. The practical answer is a 4G or 5G router with an external antenna mounted on the cabin, joined to the company network by VPN so site staff reach the same systems as everyone else. For long projects an FTTP line ordered at the start is worth the effort.

What matters is that the site connection is treated as part of the network rather than a personal hotspot: monitored, secured and documented, so that when the project ends the router comes back and goes to the next one.

Mobile devices for site staff

Site managers, fitters and drivers work from phones and tablets. The decisions are:

Rugged cases and spare batteries are a small cost against the alternative of a fitter who cannot log a job. Microsoft 365 with mobile device management gives most firms what they need without extra software. See our Microsoft 365 services for the setup.

Systems that cannot stop: hire desks, CIS and payroll

Most firms run a hire or job management system (products such as inspHire, Syrinx, MCS or Point of Rental in plant hire, and Procore, Eque2 or Sage for contractors) alongside accounting and payroll. Your IT provider should know where each runs, who backs it up and what the plan is if the server fails on the 18th of the month.

Guidance on Construction Industry Scheme obligations is published on GOV.UK, and the IT requirement that follows from it is simple: the software and the HMRC logins used to file must be available, protected by MFA, and free of planned changes in the days before a deadline.

Cyber risk in construction

The NCSC's small business guide covers the baseline controls, and two apply with particular force to construction:

Payment fraud. A criminal who has read a project manager's mailbox for a few weeks knows which subcontractor is due a payment and sends an email changing the bank details. The control is a verification call to a known number before any bank detail change, and MFA on every mailbox so the criminal never gets in.

Ransomware. An infection that encrypts the server stops the hire desk, quoting, drawings and payroll at once. Endpoint detection and response on every machine including depot PCs, patching handled centrally, and backups with an offline or immutable copy are the difference between a bad day and a bad quarter. Our backup and disaster recovery service is built around tested restores for this reason.

Choosing IT support for a construction business

Look for a provider who already supports multi-depot businesses, who will attend a depot or site rather than insisting everything is done remotely, and who understands that a hire desk offline is a trading problem rather than a ticket. Ask how they monitor depot connections, how quickly they can get a new site office online, and how they handle a phone or tablet that goes missing.

What to do next

If you have depots on separate broadband lines with no VPN between them, site staff on unmanaged personal phones, or a server that has not had a restore tested this year, an independent review will show you where the risks are. Book an IT health check and we will report on every location, prioritised by the cost of downtime to the business.