The Buttimer Group is a diversified
Engineering Group; we work in numerous different sectors; we work in the
sectors I suppose as broad-ranging as the pharmaceutical industry to
the power and energy industry; we work in the mining industry, the
food and beverage industry,
the animal feedstuffs industry and
of course the subject we'll talk about today, we work
in the port industry and the reason we work in so many different sectors and
is the business was
initially a domestic business in the Irish market
and with the market the size of Ireland being so small
you're forced to work in many different industries. However, our core industry is
always remain the mechanical handling of dry bulk cargoes
within the port sector we have up to
core businesses: our first is design and process engineering
and installation; this this can range from
from layout design from consultancy and partnerships or
advising clients through to complete construction project management
our other sector in the port industry is we
the production of high-quality port equipment
We recently re-branded this as dock solid
and I suppose the three words we put with that are clean,
flexible, and robust, and we believe
for equipment that's fit for purpose
and suitable for an environment
like the port industry, those three words are very important
cleanest clean would have to be environmentally friendly to fit
in with ports in
different regulations internationally,
flexibility both as a piece of equipment that needs to be flexible
but as a business we need to be flexible to be able to work
and meet our clients needs; and and the final word
robust the equipment needs to be built in in a way that
it can be sustained and maintained and operate in a very harsh environment
which is a port
facility. You recently expanded your business to Poland;
since this move you've undertaken a number of projects involving
the design and installation of bulk terminals in the region. Can you elaborate a little
more
on these terminal projects in regards to their design, the equipment
offered and the scale of these projects in general?
Yes we started in the Polish market in
2005 and
in the last I suppose three years we probably are
the leading provider of Port solutions in
the Polish market. We completed a project for Bunga International
we built a new port facility for them in the Port of Swinouisjcie on the
Polish-German border where we put in a facility for importing
soybean cake that they produce in their
processing plants in South America; we have a
ship unloading facility that unloads soybean cake
at approximately 1000 tons per hour;
there's a handling system that takes the product
from ship through to store;
we can then also discharge from the store soybean cake to
at roughly seven hundred tonnes per hour. As capacities get larger and larger
going through ports
the demands and equipment increase every day
and as a result the equipment that you produce needs to be
fit-for-purpose, it needs to be a piece of equipment that
the client at the port can be guaranteed of getting
productivity out of, getting usage out of them.
A piece of equipment can be the best in the world but if it isn't operating its of no use to a
client.
So for us we produce a piece of equipment that
it is mechanic and fail-safe so that everything
that involved in it so if something goes wrong a man can walk-in
any part of the world with his toolbox and repair it with
locally-sourced components. We don't have to fly a piece of computer equipment in
to the middle Africa from America that takes three weeks to get in and the client
doesn't know
use of his equipment in that meantime. For us it's very important that the equipment
is built fit-for-purpose so that's very much
taking into account the porters working in
and the areas working in and we have developed our equipment to
a point that we now feel that with a brand like
dock solid we are offering a unique piece of kit
that's not out. So beyond the dock solid range
are there any other products in the pipeline that we should be aware of?
I suppose to clarify the brand dock solid,
dock solid isn't specific to one piece of equipment
we supply the piece of equipment to
the Port of Buchanan in Liberia which was a
industry-leading
piece of mobile ship loading equipment. We developed
in conjunction with a company called tele stack also an Irish company,
we developed a ship-loading
telescopic conver if you want to call it that
our system for loading up to post Panamax size ships
and our part of
design was the under-carriage the convert telescopic goes on top of
our old wheel travel
under-carriage system which allowed from
massively decreased times in hutch-change
and hence we can
confidently say we can reduce the for a Panamax size ship we can
reduce the ship-loading time by a
over four hours. The under-carriage we designed actually
in conjunction with Telestack won an award with the
International Bulk Journal for its innovative design,
and the innovation was in the undercarriage
in the system that we used
and again it's back to being flexible and robust.
We were able to move our equipment flexibly and
quickly and it's built in a way that it can be maintained
and run in an environment, a harsh environment like the port to Buchanan
loading iron ore at a capacity of 2,000 tonnes an hour.
It is a piece of equipment that is part of the dock solid range and its
equipment
we're looking to push into other parts of the world - be it Africa, be it the Middle
East
be it further in Europe, and we feel it's an innovative piece of equipment
and