This article is from Business Excellence Magazine
This Canadian engineering company is making its mark in the mining industry with a contribution to energy saving and the environment. Alan Swaby talks to co-CEOs Marc Boudreau and Denis Pitre and to the corporate services/sales & marketing manager Pat Dubreuil.
Aficionados of Doctor Who will be familiar with the Tardis concept – a deceptively small exterior encompassing a surprisingly large interior. In engineering terms, the Canadian company BESTECH is not dissimilar.
Started in 1995 by Marc Boudreau and Denis Pitre, the business initially offered electrical engineering services to the various mining operations found in and around the Sudbury region of Ontario. Since then, though, year-on-year growth in the order of 30 percent per annum has been achieved through the addition of more skills and operating divisions. Now you can find civil, structural and mechanical engineers working alongside their electrical counterparts and providing a full blown engineering and project management package.
With revenue in the $20+ million bracket, the business is small by global standards but in Sudbury it is a senior player, so much so that it is attracting more and more work from Vale Canada, the single biggest mining company in the area. “We are very pleased to have Vale on our client list,” says co-CEO Marc Boudreau, “not least because it is a reliable indicator for other potential customers. We are particularly involved with the Coleman nickel mine, not only providing principal engineering services to Vale for the regeneration of the mine but also working closely with the company’s R&D engineers. This relationship has generated some of the most innovative solutions to engineering problems we have been involved with.”
It’s this development of innovative new ideas that has prepared a platform for BESTECH to spring into a completely different league – and a completely different mix of activities. Over the years, various engineering solutions have been created for specific situations but which have been recognized by the engineering team as having wider applications. All of them share a common theme of monitoring and controlling conditions, using BESTECH’s long standing expertise in the use of programmable logic controllers.
“Electrical engineers not familiar with the rigors of mining life,” says sales & marketing manager Pat Dubreuil, “often completely underestimate just how arduous conditions are below ground and just what control equipment has to face. In order to give our systems the reliability needed, their design – wherever possible – is based on the use of a PLC platform.”
Last year BESTECH reorganized its structure to prepare for the promotion of these new innovative products and services. Dubreuil is charged with the development of this side of the business. “Although, in each case,” he says, “we have a packaged concept that can be offered to customers, there is still a lot of individual engineering that has to go into them. They also take us into an area where we haven’t really been before – in that we manufacture these products in-house, something that has taken considerable capital investment on our part to gear up thoroughly with the technology needed for manufacture.”
The most advanced of these products is a system for adding control into what is often the single largest consumer of energy in mining – ventilation. In development for 10 years, the product is known as NRG1 and the recently released third generation has earned the tag ECO thanks to its energy consumption optimizationcapabilities.
“Hard rock mines in particular,” explains Boudreau, “often spend as much as 60 percent of their energy on running extensive ventilation networks. Without adequate means of control, mines have no option but to run ventilation fans continuously with resulting high levels of waste. They are pushing air around whether or not it is necessary. With NRG1-ECO™ we have shown that annual power consumption can be reduced by 30 to 40 percent compared with a similar sized but uncontrolled system.”
For the rest of this article, please go to the Business Excellence Magazine website: http://www.bus-ex.com/article/bestech