Why we built ORKSTRA — from an Aletlala site office to a MENA-wide platform

ORKSTRA did not start in a pitch deck. It started in a site office in Mussafah, Abu Dhabi, in March 2025, with a printed Interim Payment Certificate on the table and a consultant rejecting eleven measurement lines because the as-built photos were sitting in three different WhatsApp groups and nobody could prove which week they were taken.

That IPC was eventually approved at about 88% of the submitted value. The lost money was not the worst part. The lost two weeks of working capital — for a contractor running over fifty active projects — was.

I went home that night and started writing what the system would have to do to make that meeting never happen again. About fourteen months later, that document is ORKSTRA.

This post is the honest version of why we built it, who it is for, and what it is deliberately not.

The world we came from

Aletlala General Contracting is a mid-size UAE contractor — the kind of operation that anchors most of the GCC construction market. Fifty plus live projects. A few hundred people across sites and head office. Strong technical talent. Strong field discipline. And until 2025, an operations stack that looked like this:

• Tenders lived in Excel files inside a shared OneDrive folder.
• BOQ pricing lived in more Excel, with rates copy-pasted from supplier quotes by whoever happened to be available.
• Project execution lived in WhatsApp groups, one per project.
• Quality and safety lived on paper clipboards.
• Accounting lived in a generic ledger product that did not understand IPCs, retention, advance recovery, or variation orders.

Each tool made local sense. Together they produced the headache every GCC contractor will recognise: nobody had the full picture of any project at any moment.

The headline metric in April 2025: average IPC cycle was twenty-one days from joint measurement to consultant sign-off. The industry benchmark we kept hearing about — four to seven days — felt like science fiction.

What we tried first (and why it did not work)

Before we built anything, we tried to buy our way out.

• Procore — beautiful product, but priced and shaped for North American GCs. No Hijri calendar. No Arabic-first UI. No FIDIC IPC template. Subcontractor model assumes single-tier US norms, not the GCC reality of nominated sub-subs.
• Aconex — solid document control, but Aconex is a document layer, not an ERP. It does not run a BOQ or generate IPCs or post a retention journal.
• Local Arabic-first ERPs — strong on accounting and weak on construction-specific objects: no BOQ items, no measurement records, no variation pricing methods.

We did not need a US tool with Arabic added on. We needed a MENA tool that happened to also speak English. Those are different starting points.

The brief, written on a whiteboard in May 2025

The brief that became ORKSTRA was four lines:

1. Arabic-first. Site staff will not learn an English app.
2. One platform. Tender to project to IPC to handover, no exports between modules.
3. Real construction objects. BOQ lines, IPCs, variation orders, retention, subcontractor commitments.
4. Built for MENA reality. UAE VAT, KSA ZATCA, Egypt VAT, WPS payroll, FIDIC contracts, Hijri dates where they matter.

Everything since has been an expansion of that brief, not a pivot away from it.

What ORKSTRA is today

A multi-tenant construction ERP that handles tender management, BOQ pricing, QTO with Triple-AI Verified Takeoffs, project execution, IPC generation under FIDIC, variation orders, material intelligence, HSE, quality control, and integration with KAPSARC and government price feeds.

In numbers, as of May 2026:

• 50+ projects live on the platform inside Aletlala.
• IPC cycle compressed from 21 days to under 5.
• BOQ takeoffs that used to take a senior QS 28 hours now close in about 5, with higher confidence.
• 245 UAE-specific material entries seeded into the catalog.
• Three AI vision models — Claude, Gemini, self-hosted YOLOv8 — cross-checking every drawing.

What ORKSTRA deliberately is not

Naming what a product is matters less than naming what it is not.

• Not a single-trade tool. We do not do interior fit-out only or MEP only. The full execution chain is the point.
• Not a US-style "platform plus marketplace". We are not selling ads to suppliers. Contractor data stays inside the contractor's tenant.
• Not a thin localisation of a Western product. The Arabic UI is not a translation layer. The contract objects are not US AIA forms.

The MENA scope

ORKSTRA today supports UAE, KSA, Egypt, and a generic FIDIC-default region. Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan are on the regional roadmap. We add a region when we have a real contractor in it, not because the slide deck looked thin.

The principle is that a GCC group with projects in three countries should pay one subscription, see one consolidated dashboard, and have the platform handle the per-country tax and regulator differences automatically.

Who this is for

If you are a MENA contractor between 20 projects and 500, struggling with the gap between site reality and head office reporting, ORKSTRA is built for you. If you are a single-project owner with five people, you do not need us yet. If you are a regional Tier-1 with a custom SAP deployment and 200 consultants on payroll, we are probably too opinionated for you.

For the middle of the market — the contractors who build most of MENA — we believe ORKSTRA is the most honest tool available, because it was written by one of you.

Where to start

Two front doors. Pick whichever fits your style.

• /demo — book a 20-minute call. We will run Triple-AI on a drawing you bring.
• /premium-stack — read the technical map of the sixteen integrated services that make the platform work end to end.

— Eng. Amr Shoieb, Founder