When handrail and beading specialist Haldane installed Heian CNC five-axis computerised router technology in the 1990s, the company likened the experience to “being handed the keys to the Space Shuttle”.
Several years later and the Fife company’s managing director Forrester Adam offers this updated analogy: “It is like taming a horse – now we have it jumping over fences whereas before we couldn’t even get on the back of it. We are now actively creating the technology.”
Haldane has harnessed a technology that enables full three-dimensional machining and routering to create almost any shape in wood and other materials to tolerances of +/-0.05mm per 300mm. However, a large proportion of the company’s potential customer base has yet to appreciate this capability, according to Mr Adam.
“Builders and designers will tell customers that something can’t be done when it can,” he said. “We have to let people know what we can do because, generally speaking, once people have used us, they will use us all the time.”
This mission to inform potential customers about Haldane’s ability to create even the most complex handrail, beading or specialised CNC job led the company to book a prominent stand at this year’s Interbuild exhibition at Birmingham’s NEC.
Glazing beads
The company also publicised the fact that it has become not only the first supplier of timber glazing beads to be half-hour and hour fire rated, but also the first to achieve accredited supplier status under the British Woodworking Federation‘s Certifire scheme.
The company’s 600mm circular bead, its ladder frame and D-shaped all achieved half-hour fire rating status, while circular beads up to 500mm diameter were certified to one hour under BS 476 parts 20 and 22.
Fire testing costs were covered by the £10,000 prize money awarded to Haldane for being named Fife Small Business in 2000. That same year, the Glenrothes business scooped the award for Best Turnround Business at the National Business Awards. In the early 1990s, the company turned over around £600,000 a year with a workforce of 14. By the end of the decade, it was employing 40 people and had increased its profit margins by 300%.
The winning of awards and fire rating approvals has raised Haldane’s profile, as has its association with a growing number of prestigious contracts. Glazing beads have been supplied to Windsor Castle, Disneyland Paris, the Abbey Road studios and the American Embassy in London, and the British Embassy in Moscow. The company’s largest contract to date – worth almost £400,000 – involved the supply and installation of more than 2,000m of handrails and turnings for the three malls at the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.
More recently, Haldane worked with Dane Engineering of County Durham, on the Ocean Terminal complex at Leith near Edinburgh, home to the royal yacht Britannia.
He is also particularly proud of the company’s input to a less well-known project on 12 new luxury houses – each valued at around £2.5m – in London’s St John’s Wood area.
High-profile contracts
Involvement in such varied and high-profile contracts has helped the business to maintain a strong momentum since Mr Adam took over as managing director three years ago following the death of Kenneth Patullo, who had headed the business for 30 years.
The management structure has since been bolstered by the appointment of Peter Milne and Roy Peebles as non-executive chairman and director respectively, and by an upper tier of management reporting directly to the board – senior production manager David Sinclair, senior estimator Colin McLean and administration manager Christine Thomson.
The company has introduced Bead-o-Matic software which has reduced turnaround times “from two weeks down to hours” by streamlining internal administrative and production specification procedures. An on-line service will be made available to customers before Christmas, said Mr Adam. At the same time, there have been efforts to develop a multi-skilled and therefore more flexible workforce.
While the Heian CNC routers take pride of place, the past two-and-a-half years have also seen significant investment in new equipment, with more than £500,000 spent in the past two-and-a-half years on, for example, new grinding plant and new square dressers. Further expenditure on equipment is envisaged in line with Mr Adam’s goal of achieving a £5m annual turnover by 2005.
