Brendan McIlvanna, owner of bmi trailers, is celebrating 20 years in business.
The OEM has two facilities in Dungannon, County Tyrone and Redditch, England, and is a fully functional trailer company that designs, manufactures and services waste spec trailers.
Through a wide range of multi-disciplinary skills, clever design, engineering skills and offering a tailored design and build, bmi trailers help companies to develop their capability while keeping them at the forefront of technical and industrial innovation.
Over the past 20 years, bmi trailers has delivered a wide range of projects to its diverse clients and waste environmental projects from large government bodies to waste disposal companies, and to clients across the UK as well as Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Africa and Poland.
The company's core business is the waste and recycling market offering high quality transfer trailers that are designed and manufactured at its head office in Dungannon.
For McIlvanna, bmi trailers' success to date is built on excellent service, its commitment to aftersales and leading the way with innovative trailer designs.
“We believe our in-depth knowledge of manufacturing and the designing of state-of-the-art tailor-made vehicles and with highly skilled engineers this makes us superior to the other European built trailers on offer.” he said.
“Our trailers are better built, stronger, and designed to withhold UK and Irish waste is renowned to be a heavier and bulkier waste compared to European waste profiles.”
McIlvanna said bmi trailers has carved out a niche product and is steps ahead in its engineering capabilities and designs.
“We have a dedicated R&D team who are tasked with a proactive and blue sky thinking approach to keep them one step ahead,” he said. “We currently have positive growth throughout mainland Europe and due to this growth have now employed an Export Sales Manager to our rapidly growing team.”
In February 2018, bmi trailers invested in a bespoke robotic welding machine. The machine was supplied by Valk welding using the latest in Panasonic welding technology.
“Like all local engineering companies we suffer from a lack of skilled welders which was preventing us from growing our business and matching customer demand for our products,” said McIlvanna.
“Due to the size and variety of our products an automated answer was not easily found.
“Using Valk welding’s experience and our product knowledge we agreed a design of a machine that would allow us to weld multiple assemblies in a variety of different materials with minimum setup and programming time. Since the robot has been installed, we have been able to half the labour hours required to carry out the majority of our flat welding. This has allowed us to allocate skilled staff to other assemblies and enabled us to increase our production output.
“We believe that investing in innovation and new technologies is key to the company’s future success,” he said. “We are always working on improving our products and process to ensure we can offer our customers the best products and service.”
Due to the ongoing growth at the company, bmi trailers now employ over 90 staff and is actively recruiting more skilled engineering and production personnel to be based at their Dungannon site. This site is also in the process of finalising new facilities to accommodate offices for administration, marketing, sales, design and engineering.
The offices, according to bmi trailers, will include a new reception area, canteen and gym, allowing more space for the company's growing team.