It took ICS Triplex Silvertech Operations Manager Kieren Beltrame just two weeks to establish a second office in Aberdeen.
However finding suitably qualified engineering staff in support of the Company’s continuing expansion has proved a far greater challenge.
This is typical of the rapid response needed by a successful, expanding Group in today’s oil and gas marketplace and is typical of the tasks assigned to the 33 year-old Australian that require his full energy and commitment. He’s currently studying for an MBA with the Cranfield School of Management, while holding down a post that covers both the UK and US which he describes as “pretty much everything we do that’s not directly associated with engineering projects for customers, with particular emphasis on the recruitment and development of engineering staff in the context of a industry starved of engineering skills”.
The graduate engineer spent two years combining work with travel (including working for ICS Triplex Silvertech as an engineer) before progressing into project management in mining and process control in Australia. He also spent two years working in South Africa, having opened an office there for the company he was working for at the time.
The Background
Kieren returned to Silvertech as project manager in 2003 and six months later moved to his current role, “broadly to manage core business functions such as IT, HR and business strategy, with particular emphasis on staff development”.
He says: “ICS Triplex Plc has been operating for just over 40 years. They’re a world leader in the manufacture and design of high availability, fail-safe industrial control systems. The Group turns over approx $US 150 million a year and has offices all over the world. They acquired the Silvertech Group some three years ago. It’s now known as ICS Triplex Silvertech Ltd (Silvertech), we have been operating for just over 20 years with offices in four UK locations, the US, Middle East, Europe and Asia Pacific, with our key market being oil & gas.”
Whilst the other ICS Triplex Group companies focus on products, Silvertech focuses on product independent engineering design solutions and services. Says Beltrame: “We are owned by a Group with a significant product portfolio but we are wholly product independent ourselves. We focus on the solutions required by our customers, regardless of the products required to engineer them. This combined capability works very well.”
Silvertech’s Expansion
Silvertech has historically provided control and automation solutions and post-installation support. Over time the company noticed a growing need among its clients for up-front engineering design services, and often found itself having to help clients or intermediate contractors to refine specifications to more accurately define what they needed.
Silvertech engineers found themselves having to close gaps in initial specifications and designs, and though it wasn’t part of the brief Beltrame says: “We pride ourselves on a ‘right first time’ and ‘challenge the requirement’ approach and therefore found ourselves executing a scope of work often assigned to others; we therefore decided to directly offer these services to the marketplace.”
Having identified an opportunity to expand and recognising the skills within the organisation to enable it, the decision was taken to offer an Engineering Design Service (EDS) on a formal basis. He says: “We can collaborate with other Engineering Procurement Contractors (EPCs) or we are capable of operating as an EPC ourselves. The benefit of using our combined EDS, EPC and system build and support capability is that we are aware of the complete system life cycle needs and eradicate costly and time inefficient layers of responsibilities and provide a single point of contact to the client.
With an established ability in the EDS and FEED (Front End Engineering Design) areas, Silvertech recently established a full EPC capability and have already won a major contract - a systems upgrade contract for TOTAL E&P UK’s Dunbar platform, valued at some $12million over two years.
With customers for the new business unit coming on stream, it became necessary to find additional premises from which to operate in Aberdeen and suitably qualified staff to resource the new projects, a real challenge in the current industry expansion. As a result Beltrame established Silvertech’s EPC office in Riverside House, Aberdeen. Beltrame says: “I found the office and resolved the various issues in about two weeks. Location is key - it’s in central Aberdeen, near our primary EDS clients, whilst the group’s extensive North Sea support operations will continue to operate from the Silvertech facility at Aberdeen’s Science and Technology Park.”
Laying the Foundations at School and University Level
He says: “Enabling the Group to grow effectively is the real challenge. Life in this role is very fast-paced and exciting, and I’m enjoying this. The real challenge is to recruit, train and retain qualified, committed, professional staff”
“Unusually we focus our recruitment initiatives on both graduates and schools. We sponsor a school magazine with one of the schools in Aberdeen, publish it professionally and give them marketing assistance. Although no-one in the company has kids at the school we were keen to help when they approached us and it’s working really well. We show them around our offices and give them an insight into what we do. In addition I have spoken at other schools about the shape that a career as an engineer can take.”
Silvertech offers a professional training year to students at the University of Surrey, which encourages people to go out and do a year in industry.
He says: “They had seen the numbers of students applying for the professional year dropping off and asked for my assistance. I gave a brief talk about the benefits of a professional training year to about 80 students, after which 30 signed up – I was very pleased to be able to help. I also manage our graduate recruitment and training programme. We started getting back into graduate recruitment about three years ago and numbers have increased from two in the first year to twelve last year. Now we want to keep growing that.
“We have a clearly defined programme throughout the business. The big advantage of employing graduates is that everyone else in the organisation gets a chance to move their own careers forward as fresh graduates start taking on the tasks their mentors previously performed. It’s working really well. It promotes a positive culture – a graduate who’s with us for two years finds themselves managing a new graduate. It’s fantastic for building confidence and management skills.”
Communication across the company is also key as it grows, so the company is now looking at their IT infrastructure and the technologies they use to collaborate. Beltrame explains: “For the EDS business we went through the classic strategy and planning process: What do we have, where we are trying to get to. Having done that for everything to do with this new business stream, it won’t be our skills that prevent us from reaching our targets.
“As with all our business streams achieving sustainable growth is directly related to our ability to recruit, develop and retain professional, committed staff, and leverage technology and infrastructure appropriately."