Company Report: Pipe Supports Group
Doing exactly what it says on the box Pipe Supports Group is a specialist supplier of pipe supports for the power generation, petrochemical and process industries

Pipe Supports Ltd Factory

Pipe Supports Group was established in 1943

The company is a specialist supplier of pipe supports for th

Pipe Supports Ltd grew out of a company called British Industrial Engineering (BIE). Founded in 1943, BIE worked extensively with the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), building power stations through the fifties and sixties. It was during this period that the CEGB asked BIE if they wanted to take on the manufacture of a type of pipe support that the CEGB had developed. BIE agreed, and took on the manufacture of constant effort supports under a license agreement from the CEGB. This decision would have far-reaching implications for the company.

“In no time at all we had developed additional equipment to go with the constants; we developed a variable effort support and then added a range of ancillary items such as pipe clamps, beam attachments and hanger rods. Before you knew it, we had a product group,” Tech Director Stuart Barry explains. “We were selling under the name of ‘British Industrial Engineering’, which was a good, strong robust name, but it didn’t actually convey what we did. So in 1968 we formed a company called Pipe Support Limited which does exactly what it says on the box. It designs and manufactures pipe supports.”

Since its formation PSL has sold supports world-wide; its supports are used in power stations in Australia, South Africa, South America, Asia the US and across Europe. It’s supports can be found in most power stations in the UK, both nuclear and conventional. During the 70’s and 80’s the Company expanded into the petrochemical and oil industries and most recently has taken large tranches of work in the gas storage and transportation industry.

The next big change for the company would come in the early 90’s, when the business underwent two major shifts. Firstly, the CEGB was privatised, which cost Pipe Support some lucrative business and secondly, in 1993 the company was acquired by Hill and Smith Holdings, a holding company with many subsidiaries in the construction and infrastructure sectors.

“The CEGB used to have regular large scale planned maintenance activities on their power stations around the UK and it wasn’t uncommon for us to replace a complete system of pipe supports on their major power stations. That business literally disappeared overnight with the privatisation of the CEGB, they moved into reactive maintenance, essential maintenance, break-down repairs, things like that,” Barry explains.

Hill and Smith Holdings realised that as the market changed, the business would have to change as well. “Hill and Smith saw that as a threat to the business and suggested that we develop our own direct export sales,” Barry says. “Prior to that we had been directly exporting perhaps 10-15 percent of our annual sales to territories such as India and Canada. So we set about finding agents to represent us, and we now have agents in most countries around the world.”

The company now has offices in China, France, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and the USA, and agents in many more countries besides, stretching from the Middle East to Brazil. They also have manufacturing facilities in the UK, Thailand and China with plans to expand further in to the US and India thereby offering a global solution to their customers.

CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENTS
Pipe Supports’ products are built to withstand all kinds of environments. A significant part of Pipe Supports’ business comes from the cryogenic sector – the transport of liquefied natural gas with a boiling point of -165 degrees centigrade.

“Our gas supply is now running out, so we as a country need gas and we’re buying it from places like Egypt, Qatar, the Central Americas, and to ship that gas they have to condense it into a liquid,” Barry says. “Our pipe supports not only support the pipe but maintain the insulation along the pipeline. So we provide a high density moulded polyurethane insert that goes inside a fabricated steel clamp or cradle and that actually carries the dead weight of the pipe and the process forces during the cooling down or heating up operations while maintaining the integrity of the insulation system.”

Meanwhile, the company is also looking to return to the nuclear sector. “In the longer term we have our sights firmly set on getting back into the nuclear power generating industry,” Barry says. “To do that, we are currently embarking on a process of qualification to both ASME, and also to our RCC-M, which is the French nuclear qualification.”

It’s a daunting process, but Barry is confident. “We’re very optimistic about it. Our ASME manual and procedures have already been written and submitted, and given a preliminary review by our Authorised Nuclear Inspection Supervisor, and we’ve already heard that it’s okay, so our next stage now is to actually apply for the audit.”

The company has also benefited from having a strong financial force behind it. “Our parent company, Hill and Smith Holdings, are fully supportive of us and take a long-term view. In the short-term, it’s going to be quite a cost for us to do this with very little payback, but the UK nuclear industry looks like it’ll kick in around 2011, 2012. We’d anticipate starting to see orders for pipe supports probably around 2013, 2014.”

CUSTOMER SERVICE
The pipe supports industry is a competitive one, and Pipe Supports has to fight hard to win contracts. Barry is sure that the company’s prices give it a competitive edge, but more than that, the company’s philosophy is what keeps people coming back.

“Our philosophy is not to just go out there and sell a product, it’s to go out there and help people find solutions. We’re not a company that says, ‘this is what you must do’. We say, ‘what would you like to do?’

“We’re very flexible in terms of issues such as corrosion protection. Some of our competitors have a standard house corrosion protection system and will not offer anything else. If we have a customer who wants their pipe supports painted to a particular specification or have them galvanised then that’s what we do.”

To give the customer exactly what they want, it’s important to be able to communicate easily with them, and Pipe Supports has taken several steps to ensure this. Firstly, to keep the customer informed, the company has a website where customers can access catalogues and topical FAQ’s. The catalogue shows the standard range of parts that can be combined to make various forms of pipe hanger assembly. “It’s like a Meccano set really,” Barry says.

Still, the catalogue is only the beginning. “If the customer wants something that is not in our standard range then we’ll make it.”

As well as keeping customers informed, Pipe Supports is also keen to make it easy for customers to explain what they need. To this end, it supplies them with its in-house CAD software. The software “allows them to create pipe support drawings to scale, produces detailed bills of materials and actually those drawings can feed into our estimating system and give us a quick way of generating a quote. Eventually, if we win the order, it also gives us a quick way of getting goods to the factory floor.”

This is also the same software used by Pipe Supports’ draughtsmen. “It is software we’ve developed for our own internal use, so it’s not just a gimmicky giveaway.”

Barry believes it’s an approach that gives the company an important edge in a future where strong customer support is going to be all important in an industry suffering a dearth of technical skills.

“In view of the size of the global market and the changes ahead, we expect to grow significantly from our existing £25million turnover levels. We intend to exploit opportunities to evolve both organically and through acquisition,” Barry says.

At Energy Digital, we have no doubt that they will meet their expectations.

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