Industry News

Bruce Rock Engineering opens new WA facility

On 27 October, Bruce Rock Engineering (BRE) held the official opening of its 18,000-square-metre Forrestfield facility. The location, set up on a 40,000-square-metre site, will prepare the trailer builder for the growth and demand to come in the next decade.

The new facility is set up with two separate buildings. One is for steel processing, which houses BRE’s sister company, Transbeam Industries, and features CNC higher-plasma laser piping, press breaks, and all the typical metal processing elements that is required for BRE’s in-house transport manufacturing. The other part of the building is dedicated to chassis fabrication, which includes chassis rail beam machines, chassis and dolly fabrication, robotic welding of medium-sized componentry for draw bars and dollies, and a blast and paint facility as well.

The second building on the site is split in two for BRE’s repair, maintenance and refurbishing services. It features 45-metre drive through bays that will accommodate AB-triple and 42-metre triple combinations, three full-length pits with hydraulic platforms for BRE’s service and repair functions and a final assembly of dollies, general freight and refrigerated vans with a wash bay on the end of it.

BRE Managing Director, Damion Verhoogt, says the Forrestfield facility significantly increases BRE’s manufacturing ability as well as giving it a massive increase in repair, maintenance, backup support, dedicated spare parts and a much-improved customer service experience.

“It underpins our ability to keep up with our market growth and continue to service our current and new customers,” he says. “It gets us back under one site in the metro area, a hugely expanded repair and maintenance refurbishing and service capability with those drive through bays. We never had a blast and paint facility in Perth, so we were relying on third party contractors to do any of that stuff in Perth for us which was problematic from a cost, timing logistics and management front. So, bringing that in-house is a big bonus.”

It will also give BRE space to invest in new CNC machinery, pipe and tube lasers, new press brakes and new robots.

“It just allowed us to clean slate material and product flow that will bring us some reasonably significant efficiency improvements over time,” Damion says.

The decision to invest in and create the new facility, Damion says, was essential as it was evident that BRE outgrew its Perth facility that was built in 2016 within a couple of years.

“We actually had another leased facility in Perth for three or four years as well – we were operating off two sites in Perth which was just a bit of a nightmare,” he says. “It’s hard enough operating off remote sites, let alone extra sites in the same city. So, we wanted to design and build something that was going to get us back onto one site in Perth and future-proof our capacity and growth requirements for at least 10 years to handle what we’re going to do out of the WA market.

“Traditionally we’d only done what we thought was plenty at the time, but we should have made it bigger. So, we made a conscious effort of not doing that this time and making sure that we had enough space for the foreseeable future. That being said – this facility was designed for us to grow into, rather than being what we needed for the next few years.”

Damion has been a part of BRE since he was very young, where, from an early age, he would help out at the family business on weekends and school holidays. Having grown up in the company and surpassed 20 years as an official member of the team he says it’s a relief to see the new facility finally operational.

“It’s been a battle, especially in the current construction environment during Covid which is what we were dealing with,” he says. “It’s been a massive challenge, and it’s great to actually see it completed and operational. The focus now turns to getting the efficiency through the improvements it was designed to give.”

The post Bruce Rock Engineering opens new WA facility appeared first on Trailer Magazine.

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