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Irish trailer manufacturer SDC is gearing up to take on the big boys with a £3.3m investment in new plant. And nearly one third of the money has come from regional funding.
For many hauliers, designing a trailer still means getting out the proverbial fag packet and a pencil stub and sending off their doodlings to a manufacturer's drawing office. Traditions die hard.
And even though Irish trailer manufacturer SDC, based in Toomebridge, County Antrim, has an office employing advanced computerassisted drawing equipment, the company still receives these primitive expressions of customers' requirements. "We do our best to translate," says Brian Clay, chief engineer in charge of SDC's design team.
The drawing office employs Autocad, which can, for example, alter the wheelbase of a tipper chassis from 7.2m to 7.6m on screen
and at the same time change all the relative dimensions automatically: "In the old days that had to be worked out with paper and pencil—now you can achieve the same with a relativelysmall drawing-office team," says Clay.
The CAD equipment enables stress analysis to be carried out on trailers before a single rail is castlightweight trailers can be designed and tested pre-production: "Every kilo you save the customer makes him very happy," says Clay. But safety is paramount, he adds: "The minimum safety factor we work to is 2:1—below that you get problems with necks deflecting."
Clay's team works at what is perhaps the glamorous end of SDC's operation. Elsewhere on the Toomebridge site, production capacity has been extended in a £3.3m development which includes a 28% grant from the Irish Development Board, recognising the region's high priority for development.
John McGuckian of the Irish Development Board visited Toomebridge for the official opening of the extended works on the last day of October: "Northern Ireland is a good place to set up, not least because of the quality of the labour force," he says.
The development includes an in-line shotblaster and four high-bake ovens. The old manufacturing unit has been converted into a nine-bay paintshop using only pre-packaged ICI Autocolor paint, backed with a five-year guarantee. "If a customer has a problem we send ICI in to assess," says Des O'Connor, SDC's sales and marketing director.
O'Connor is based in Mansfield where SDC has set up a marketing and manufacturing operation on the site of tipping body manufacturer Neville Charrold, which it acquired to make in-roads into the UK tipper market. The English base also makes it easier to sell SDC's range of curtainsiders, boxes and other trailers into the British market.
The Irish Development Board's decision to back SDC with a large amount of cash has been influenced by the new jobs which the project will bring. Manufacturing capacity rises to 35 trailers a week and the company aims to reach 65 a week by September 1996. The present workforce of 160 is set to rise to 190 by January Curiously, for an engineering company of its size, the workers have no trade union representation, although finishing workshop foreman Eugene McCrystal says there is a good relationship between workers and management. Some wages, he believes, are negotiated individually Among the customers visiting Toomebridge for the opening was Ian Witch, managing director of UCI Logistics, His firm was taking receipt of its first trailer from a 11.2m order for 50 trailers, with an order fora further 10 to be confirmed. The deal involves SDC taking about 100 old trailers in partexchange which it will resell elsewhere. "This is the outcome of a £6m investment in our own business which will increase to £11m next year," says Witch, adding that the SDC trailers will meet a need from one of its subsidiaries. United Glass.
Operations manager at Toomebridge, Brendan McIlvanna, believes the next step is to target further large users, such as Dawsonrentals. "We feel that to be really effective we have to be in the English market," he says, adding that the Mansfield base provides convenient access to the Continent as well as reducing shipping costs for units manufactured there. The factory at Mansfield will itself be extended to allow it to finish some products made in Ireland and to develop new products. It is unlikely, however, that the Nottinghamshire region can attract Government backing in the same way that