NASC Launches new promotional film
Burflex vehicle investment strengthens expansion push
Hull based Burflex (Scaffolding) Ltd. (Burflex) has recently splashed the cash and invested around £1 million in twelve Range D26 wide 6×2 Renault trucks.
The new trucks, which were specified to Burflex’s requirements, join the existing fleet of over 70 vehicles in the Burflex fleet; the company invested in 47 Renault Kangoo vans in 2015. “Investment in the company is a necessity to strengthen our position in the industry. We are constantly expanding our operating areas, so the need for the reliability to deliver the scaffolding to our customer’s sites is paramount to production of the over 150 scaffolders we now employ,” said Steve Cox, Burflex’s managing director.
The 12 new trucks have been acquired under a four-year repair and maintenance contract with Thompson Commercials Ltd., which is also based in Hull. Burflex says that this arrangement allows the company access to maintained vehicles and enhances reliability. Martin Williams (Hull) Ltd. built the truck’s bodies to Burflex’s specifications enabling Burflex to maximise system and conventional scaffolding carrying capability safely and securely.
“The vehicles are running fully loaded on multiple drops and doing a significant amount of miles per day. These trucks will strengthen our capability to maintain our customer’s requirements and deadlines, regardless of distance from any one of our regional depots,” said Rich Fieldhouse, Burflex’s operations manager.
Burflex says that the new truck deal mean that the scaffolding company has invested almost £2 million since 2015 generating 50 additional full-time jobs. Fieldhouse confirmed that all of the new jobs are driving positions. “We don’t find it hard to recruit or retain,” said Fieldhouse.
Fieldhouse explained Burflex’s reasoning why the company decided on Renault. “We invested in a fleet of 50 Renault vans last year and wanted to keep both fleets the same. This was a good deal from a local supplier and was commercially a good deal for Burflex,” he said.
Times have been tough of late but not for Burflex. “We as a company have had year on year growth through the recession and are not experiencing any decline in construction,” said Fieldhouse. We asked Fieldhouse if there are any other expansion plans in the pipeline? “Yes,” said Fieldhouse. “Hopefully in the future. We are currently looking for premises for a new depot.”
Third Annual CISRS Instructors Conference
The third annual CISRS Instructors Conference took place on the 17th September, at the Birches conference centre, National Construction College East, Bircham Newton, Kings Lynn.
The event was heralded a success by CISRS scheme management and the 40+ delegates in attendance. The conference was chaired by Scheme Manager, Dave Mosley who spoke on CISRS standardisation particularly in relation to the recent changes to the Part 2 training package, CPD for Scaffolders, which is to be introduced in 2017. He also faced an open Q&A session at the conclusion of the conference fielding a series of questions from the instructors, leading to an open exchange of dialogue on scaffold training and the CISRS scheme. CISRS Scheme Manager, Dave Mosley said: “As with previous events, there was some lively debate and difference of opinion on some issues – but I do think having these conversations is an important thing to do. “The instructors are running these courses week in week out, so it is essential we get together, hear what they have to say and try to give clear guidance of how we wish everyone to move forward in a way that is beneficial to both those attending courses and the instructors themselves.” Other speakers at the conference included: Ex-NASC President and CISRS representative, Bob Whincap who covered CISRS scheme rules and instructor responsibilities. Tony Barry (Senior Instructor at NCC Midlands), who previewed the work carried out so far by the CISRS standardisation Group on the Advanced programme and Simian Risk Management Limited MD and Temporary Works Forum member,Simon Hughes. He discussed how temporary works procedures can apply to the scaffolding sector and plans to introduce more information surrounding this topic into the CISRS training scheme. Simon Hughes said: “We used my presentation as a workshop exercise where we asked each group to consider the core courses in the scheme and list the areas of temporary works that should be included in each course. We divided the room into four groups with a spokesperson for each group feeding their recommendations back to the conference for further feedback. The recommendations from the conference will form the basis of the Temporary Works module we are developing for each course, with appropriate content focused towards the learner.” David John Adams, Lead Instructor at CISRS training centre AIS said: “It was my first time attending the conference and I thought it was very good. The Friday evening was more of a social event and gave me a chance to talk to other instructors in a relaxed atmosphere. As AIS has only recently received Part 2 accreditation it was interesting to hear questions raised by other centres around delivery of these courses. The conversations that followed were very open and will help me to avoid any potential issues in future Part 2 courses.”Roth Gerüste: Advanced Scaffolding Secrets Revealed
Written By Rhymer Rigby
How do you scaffold a railway viaduct running across an Alpine valley or a pointy-steepled, centuries-old church on a peninsula which is surrounded on three sides by a lake? What about a 100 metre high concave-shaped dam or a new building on a steep mountainside? And how do you ensure that all these scaffolds can deal with tons of snow and ice? These are all questions that Switzerland’s largest scaffolding company routinely has to deal with.
In its home country, Roth Gerüste is well-known for its innovative, technically daring feats of scaffolding. And Roth Gerüste is the market leader in a country where scaffolding is taken very seriously indeed. “Here it is considered a craft in its own right and standards are extremely high” explains Giorgio Laurenti, chairman of Roth and Keystone Constructions AG, the Swiss family office and private equity group which owns a majority share of the company.
This is not just Swiss pride speaking. To illustrate the Swiss difference, Laurenti produces two pictures. One is of a scaffolded building in central London; the other is a scaffolded building in Switzerland. There’s nothing wrong with the former – it looks entirely normal – but the Swiss scaffolding is something else. Even from a distance and to my untrained eye, it’s sleek, high-tech and elegant.
The reason they look so different is, while UK scaffolders tend to use steel poles with bolted joints and wooden boards to walk on, at Roth Gerüste, it’s all mechanical joints, and high-tech, low-weight aluminium platforms. “It’s a modular system and it’s very efficient and light,” says Mr Laurenti. “It can go up and down very quickly.”
Roth Gerüste traces its roots back to 1932 and its present form to 1958. The name dates from 1987 and, over the past two decades, it has become the market leader in Switzerland, where it now has 17 locations and employs over 400 staff. In 2015, Keystone Constructions AG acquired a majority share in Roth Gerüste with a view to complementing its existing portfolio of real estate ventures.
It has proven a sound business. In the words of Javad Marandi, the Swiss-based financier who is also an investor in Roth Gerüste: “It is a highly efficient company, well managed, and the market leader in an industry that has high barriers to entry. The company’s reputation within Switzerland has been built over many years.”
And this is in the context of the general investment climate in Switzerland. “Switzerland is a mature, low-risk market for investors, and attractive for investing in high-quality firms with steady growth potential.”
The high regard the Swiss hold scaffolding in is rooted in the landscape and climate. Sixty percent of Switzerland is mountainous and the weather is often severe in the winter. “This means that scaffolding has to be like engineering,” explains Mr Laurenti.
The company tends to work on large projects and, is usually involved from the very start. “We will sometimes be working with the clients before the building permission is granted,” says Mr Laurenti. The scaffolding is very much an integral part of the construction process. “We present the projects with the architect and the engineers. We make our own recommendations and we’ve often changed the course of the construction.” This might mean anything from starting the building at a different point because it is not possible to scaffold into, say, a river, to explaining that actually, parts of the design may not be achievable because a supporting scaffold cannot be built.
The scaffolders also ensure that they are logistically aligned with the contractors. “The efficiency of the construction site is highly dependent on the delivery timing of the scaffolding. So we have to be on site, on time and they really have to rely on us.” If the scaffolders are not there, everything is late, and costs rise. Roth Gerüste, Mr Laurenti says, is utterly committed to both reliability and Switzerland’s world-beating safety standards, both of which minimise delays. Indeed, well-designed scaffolding speeds up the construction process.
Once building has started, the company remains flexible and reactive. “You partner with the site managers,” explains Mr Laurenti. “They will sometimes call in an emergency and say ‘We have to change this or the architects have decided to do something different or the roof has changed to save money.’” This can mean altering the design of the scaffolding – and often very quickly so as to minimise delays and extra costs.
Indeed, it is a mistake to see scaffolding as static. “From the outside people see scaffolding go up as the building goes up and go down when it’s finished. But it’s a living, breathing thing that is often altered every day. Whenever you want to execute or change something, you have to ask the scaffolding guy to come on service and react quickly.” This is one of the reasons the company has 17 sites in a country half the size of Scotland. “We have to be reachable on site within 20-30 minutes.”
Because the company is so committed to reliability and quality, it has a strong emphasis on training. “Our staff come in fairly young and get trained and then they escalate in position, often doing different jobs until they become site managers,” says Mr Laurenti. Employees will sometimes go to other scaffolding companies, but retention is generally very high. “We give prizes for over five years, ten years, fifteen years. Some of the senior managers have been with us for twenty years.”
Roth Gerüste is also pushing the bounds of what can be scaffolded. The company has its own engineering division and development team which uses computer modelling to design ways to scaffold once impossible structures. Much of this is down to the demands of clients – as architecture changes and becomes more daring, scaffolding has to change with it. “We are working on scaffolding which is suspended from a building’s roof,” says Mr Laurenti. “You build the scaffold based on this suspension and it never touches the ground.”
Perhaps surprisingly, for all this, the company has no plans to take Swiss quality scaffolding out of Switzerland. Indeed, Mr Laurenti says he believes that it is better to deliver excellence and reliability in a market you understand than take risks in markets that you don’t know.
But there may be another factor at play here. The Swiss building industry demands high quality and is used to paying high prices for it. “What we offer doesn’t come cheap – and people in other countries might not be prepared to pay for our standards. “We offer a Rolls-Royce type service.”
Alltask Selects Avontus Quantify for Stock Control Solution
Like many other scaffolding firms, Alltask used spreadsheets to track materials as they travelled between the yard and work sites. In 2002, the company also hired a software developer to build an internal system for tracking basic stock movements. But the program didn’t provide a global view of stock holdings, and Alltask lost track of the developer and couldn’t keep the software updated.
“We got to the stage that none of us had any idea what we were sending or receiving. There were so many anomalies and mistakes that there was no real appetite for cross-checking,” Shearer says.
The lack of visibility led to real losses. Shearer estimates the company often sacrificed 15 to 20 percent of stock it sent out, mostly because customers would damage or fail to return materials. “If you don’t take care of that, you’re going to lose a fortune,” he says.
Mistakes also led to inefficiency. When trucks went out without all requested materials, not only would customers complain, but Alltask would also have to dispatch a second vehicle and keep workers on the job longer. “That’s double the labour cost and double the transport cost. It starts adding up. Getting it wrong on a simple delivery could cost an extra 40%,” Shearer says.
Alltask turned to Quantify, Avontus Software’s asset management system, in July 2015. At first, supervisors and yard managers were hesitant. “In our industry, nobody likes change because they’re too busy doing their day-to-day jobs to accept change easily,” Shearer points out. But the new software quickly paid off.
It became easy to monitor the movement of individual components and check stock balances across the business. “It came as quite a shock how much we were losing, and the only way we know that is using Quantify,” Shearer says.
When materials didn’t make it back from a job, Quantify immediately flagged missing items and who was responsible. Alltask could now use the data to prove when customers were at fault and charge them for missing materials.
By adding on Quantify Web, Alltask was able to give supervisors in the field access to stock data using tablets. Instead of phoning in requests for materials, supervisors could themselves create a pick list for the following day and send it straight to the yard. Shearer says this has cut down on mistakes and wasted time. “There’s a lot of value in the material arriving correctly and going up correctly,” Shearer says.
Being able to immediately check current stock also helped with accounting for depreciation returns. “Before, at the end of every year we’d take a bit of a guess, and the accountant would say, ‘You don’t have enough backup,” Shearer says. “We do now!”
Now, every quarter he uses Quantify to quickly create a report showing stock values, expenses and losses. This has allowed him to provide solid evidence for the company’s books, including depreciation of assets.
On all fronts, more visibility has meant greater efficiency. “There’s a trail now, where there wasn’t before. It’s taken the guesswork out,” Shearer says. Scaffmark: A security engraver from Montana Scaffolding
“Scaffmark is a handheld marking machine that engraves company identification into scaffolding materials we are currently using it to provide security to ready-lock transoms, aluminium beams, stair treads, loading bay gate arms, hop up brackets and rubbish chute fixing frames, this item could also be used for marking system scaffolds,” said Montana’s director, Alan Clark.
Clark explained that Montana spends upwards of £10,000 a year on buying paint alone to identify the company’s scaffolding equipment, let alone the labour of applying it. “And we still have materials stolen as companies just paint over the top of our paint,” said Clark. “With Scaffmark even if you apply paint over the top company details are still visible as names are imprinted into scaffold products so you can categorically identify your product immediately without sending off a paint sample to confirm if it is your equipment.”
Scaffmark has 40 characters on its ramping wheel and although it is a new product costing £1,250 plus vat, Clark estimates that with normal use and regular greasing the engraver should last for up to 10 years. “The names could possibly be written over and if so it would identify that the product was possibly stolen but certainly not as easy as just painting over someone else’s security paint colour,” said Clark.
“I have spoken with technical at the NASC (National Access and Scaffolding Confederation) and they have said Scaffmark will be raised at their coming meetings,” he said. Clark is awaiting feedback from the meeting but was encouraged at the initial response. Second CISRS OSTS Centre Opens in South Korea
CISRS have announced the accreditation and opening of a second Overseas Scaffolding Training Scheme (OSTS) centre in South Korea.
The new centre in Ulsan, in the south of the country, is opened in partnership with OSTS approved training providers, Safety & Access and Applus Velosi: Oil and gas industry sector service providers, who focus on vendor inspection, third party inspection, certification, testing, engineering and manpower services for the oil & gas sector globally. The Ulsan centre offers CISRS scaffold related training including OSTS Scaffolder Levels 1-3, scaffold inspection and scaffold supervisor courses. The accreditation audit was carried out this month by CISRS Scheme Manager, Dave Mosley, who was already in South Korea conducting the annual accreditation visit to the existing Safety and Access CISRS centre in Geoje. This centre established in 2013 has trained over 2,500 scaffolders, supervisors and inspectors in collaboration with Samsung Heavy Industries. Following the accreditation, Safety & Access Joint MD Rick Statham said: “The new centre represents a very important location for us, based in Ulsan it provides a strategic base to support the major shipbuilding and offshore industries which operate locally. We have been trading in South Korea for approaching four years and we can see the requirement for quality training growing as interest in and respect for the CISRS Overseas scheme grows.” Dave Mosley and Rick Statham took the opportunity to meet with key local clients including DSME, Shell and Chevron to give them a tour of the Geoje centre and outline the possibilities and future plans for CISRS training in the area. Mr Mosley said: “It is very pleasing to see the CISRS OSTS scheme doing so well and Safety & Access expanding their presence in South Korea. We hope that the new centre can emulate the success of the centre here in Geoje. “CISRS recognise the fantastic commitment made by Samsung Heavy Industries in training over 2,500 people making them, the employer and South Korea, the region with most CISRS OSTS qualified operatives worldwide. “There is an increased interest in CISRS in South Korea at the moment, despite the current downturn in the oil and gas sector and it is great to see Shell, Chevron and DSME exploring the possibility of going down the CISRS route.” The OSTS scheme started in 2012 and has now been established in UAE, Qatar, Philippines and South Korea, Nepal and Nigeria, training more than 4,500 scaffolders worldwide.CITB to close provision of services and products to international centres
The CITB is to close down its services and products at all international training centres to focus on key skills needs in Great Britain.
The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) says on its website that it has been,
“Supporting major contractors, training providers and individuals globally for over 45 years,” that global support looks like it is coming to an end, and quickly at that.
We were made aware of the contents of a private letter that went out from the CITB in August stating that as part of its regular programme of review the CITB had concluded that it should close its provision of products and support to some or all of its international centres.
We understand the letter went on to acknowledge the uncertainty this announcement would bring and said it would be able to communicate the review’s outcome by September 1, 2016. In the meantime, we understand centres likely to be affected were advised that until the outcome of the review was concluded the CITB would not progress applications for renewal or for additional recognition, licensing, accreditation or training support.
This move from the CITB has likely come as a shock to centres affected and we asked the CITB for a statement. Amanda Sergeant, head of delivery transition at CITB, said, “We have recently reviewed our international business as part of our change programme. The review concluded that CITB should close its provision of products and services internationally and focus on key skills needs in Great Britain.”
Sergeant confirmed that training providers had been informed of the CITB’s decision and that the letter of September 1 would explain what is happening in more detail.
“These changes will help CITB improve, become more efficient and be better able to meet the core skills needs of the construction industry in Great Britain,” said Sergeant.
The Reaction..
We reached out to some international training centres for their reaction to this shocking news. Fiona Sennett Operations Manager at 48.3 International said: “The whole of the international fraternity of scaffolding and working at height specialists have been surprised that the CITB are withdrawing a profitable service that has been in place, promoting the highest British standards in this industry all over the world, for 45 years. The CITB Scheme has been adopted by many countries and considered the market leader by most major clients – we have been actively promoting the CITB scheme since our inception.” “It is disappointing that there were no consultations with CITB clients across the world prior to the decision being made, and no reasonable explanation from the CITB as to why the scheme is closing on 31 December 2016.” “At 48.3 International we are very optimistic for the future following this announcement, as we are committed to our philosophy of “Safeguarding Lives Through Industry Education” – our dedication to the legacy of co-founder Terry Sennett.” “We are fortunate to have our own competency assessed scheme that has been developed by the late Terry Sennett, Ben Beaumont and Steve Gregory to service the overseas market with industry and product specific training. Because of our ability to apply UK best practice to local challenges within the scheme, it has been in very high demand from our International clients.” “We listen to all our clients needs in this market and believe that we offer the most flexible and client specific training in the world rather than making the world fit into a UK specific training program.” Joint MD at Safety & Access Rick Statham commented: “We have provided CISRS training international for many years and have a total of six accredited centres worldwide. We are aware that CITB have signalled their intention to withdraw from the international scaffold training market. Our main concern would be the potential disadvantage to learners that have CITB qualifications that will eventually expire as many of these people will have funded the training themselves and will require these for ongoing employment.”Lyndon Scaffolding selected for scaffolding package on BBC TV Centre project
F-Board Falls Into Administration
