Hands-on control and effective design save costs

At Johannesburg-based AVL Solutions, successful project management is all about hands-on control and effective design that ultimately save costs. It’s what made the difference when the company was appointed to bring in the rails for the Gautrain project several years ago – and it’s a formula that has continued to pay dividends, says AVL’s Bruce Riley. “With the Gautrain project, the exporter wanted all rails in one shipment. Having identified the supply chain constraint as the Durban port, we visited the factory in France and demonstrated how port storage costs could be minimised through shipping smaller quantities, allowing a more streamlined supply chain of rails to the ultimate distribution point in Johannesburg. “We like to get involved in the design issues at the outset and establish where the bottlenecks will be,” Riley told FTW. The company was established in 2006 by partners Terry Bantock, Grant Cox and Riley, and has evolved over the years, he said. Apart from the Gautrain, AVL has been involved in the NMPP pipeline project between Johannesburg and Durban. “We designed vehicles with a higher payload that could carry more pipes than competing tenders – which once again saved the client on costs and won us a portion of the contract.” While there has been no let-up in the number of enquiries for project work for which AVL has tendered over the past year, not many of these have materialised. “But it’s an area that we are keen to grow,” he said. One sector that is on an upward spiral, however, is bulk minerals. “We’re involved in the warehousing and packing of bulk minerals for export and recently started running bulk minerals into Maputo port,” he told FTW. CAPTION Bruce Riley … ‘looking to move into Africa.’