“But this also provides a fantastic opportunity for us to market our vast engineering capabilities to our customers by offering them productivity optimization through improving the performance of their capital assets,” says Aury, who expects Sidel’s engineering services arm to grow into a $237-million business over the next four to five years—nearly a 40-percent increase from current turnover of about $174 million.
While that’s barely over a tenth of the Sidel group’s annual turnover of over $2.05 billion at the moment, Aury clearly has all the high-level corporate faith and backing he needs to see the new Sidel upstart become a key new player in the global markets for engineering integration and consulting services.
As Sidel’s president and chief executive officer Mart Tiismann was quoted recently: “With the current economic situation, this decision illustrates our capacity to adapt to quickly changing market conditions, as well as our strong commitment to better serving our customers’ needs.”
By any measure, this is great news for the 45,000-square-foot Laval facility, a leading Canadian manufacturer of a comprehensive range of high-quality modular conveyors used by North American-based beverage plant operators—including table-top conveyors, air conveyors, case-and-pack conveyors, etc.—on their packaging lines.
And while the Laval plant has no plans to abandon its core manufacturing activities, according to Aury, its future lies in the onsite state-of-the-art testing and design center that is equipped with all the latest simulation and manufacturing process software to offer a full suite of engineering and project management services such as packaging line audits, process flow studies, layout design, auxiliary processes, piping layout, worksite coordination, commissioning and technical acceptance, etc.
Currently employing just over 220 people, the Laval plant is now part of a far-flung, independently-operating consulting business—with sister operations in France, Chile, Brazil, Portugal, Philippines and China—with a worldwide staff of 800 highly-qualified engineers and technical experts, according to Aury.
With all of the division’s facilities certified to the ISO 9000 series international quality management standards and operating under the World Class Lean Enterprise principles, Aury asserts the Sidel Engineering & Conveying business has all the world-class expertise it needs to help its global beverage industry clients to obtain optimal performance from their existing production machinery.
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