With additional intellectual capacity and extended production capability firmly in place for the year ahead, Booyco Engineering has great expectations concerning the decisions that will be made in 2014 about several major upcoming projects.

“Successes during 2013 have demonstrated that we can be competitive, not only in the domestic market, but also on the international stage,” Jeremy Pougnet, CEO of Booyco Engineering, says. “When two significant export contracts attracted global bids from all over the world last year, we secured these contracts from first world customers based in Singapore and Europe. We’ve effectively proved — both to ourselves and to future prospective customers — that we’re capable of being competitive and that we don’t have to stand back to our international competitors in terms of technical expertise. This gives us confidence for the tender decisions coming up this year.”

Investments into the company’s capacity and capability are ongoing, with the current focus on further evolving Booyco Engineering’s entire Quality Management System. Pougnet says the degree of sophistication among the company’s newer customers has prompted its management team to embark on a journey of continuous improvement that is seeing the implementation of new disciplines in Risk Management and Supply Quality Development. These initiatives will eliminate variability from the company’s processes and deliver a consistently high quality product that complies precisely with customer requirements.

“It’s not just about adding manpower,” he comments. “As we increasingly compete in a market populated by sophisticated customers with complex demands, we’ve needed to upgrade our systems and processes to be able to deal with this increased complexity. Our new Enterprise Resource Planning system will go live in March 2014, in tandem with a number of other process related procedures.

“The complexity of the specifications and the contractual conditions associated with today’s orders are unprecedented. In response, we’ve introduced several structural changes in terms of how we handle project management and also the procedures to ensure that all the other non-hardware deliverables are also met.”

This kind of attention to detail has made it possible for Booyco Engineering to realise a long held vision. Five years ago the Booyco Engineering vision included an aspiration to be on the approved vendor list of the big three rolling stock builders in the world — all based in Europe. In December 2013, the company received notification that it had made it onto the approved vendor list of one of these companies, which has a massive contract to deliver train sets for the South African railway sector.

“We’ve consciously chosen to go after customers of this calibre,” says Pougnet. “It’s always been our strategy to be at the top end of the business. We’ve intentionally targeted the high end systems that are bought by high end customers and with this comes all the high end requirements. For example, the intense engineering effort that goes into all the reliability studies is something in which we’ve been progressively become more skilled and experienced.

“Everything we’ve done over the last 28 years has contributed to our present position of being well able to access these opportunities. We’ve worked long and hard to build a business that has the capacity and depth to meet the stringent requirements of the domestic and international markets — whether these requirements focus on economic development or technical capability, production capacity and quality standards. All these areas have been successfully developed over a very long period and I believe we’re now poised to reap the rewards of all our hard work.”

Booyco Engineering has committed to achieving Integrated Management Systems Certification for ISO 9001:2008, ISO 14001:2004 and OHSAS 18001:2004 during 2014.

BOOYCO ENG OUTLOOK FOR 2014 PIC 01 : “Successes during 2013 have demonstrated that we can be competitive, not only in the domestic market, but also on the international stage,” Jeremy Pougnet, CEO of Booyco Engineering, says.

BOOYCO ENG OUTLOOK FOR 2014 PIC 02 : Investments into the company’s capacity and capability are ongoing, with the current focus on further evolving Booyco Engineering’s entire Quality Management System.