bmi Trailers founder Brendan McIlvanna is celebrating 20 years in business and looks forward to the decades ahead for his well-established manufacturing company based in Granville, Dungannon.
The company has two locations, the production plant in Dungannon, County Tyrone and Servicing & Hire facility at Redditch, England.
bmi is a fully functional trailer company that designs, manufactures and services waste specification trailers – it’s a broad service company that offers everything under one roof – from production to servicing, hire and parts. Brendan recognises that customers’ needs change and evolve constantly. “Most companies are looking for ways to develop skills and processes for better strategic planning and long-term profitability – often in an increasingly competitive environment. Through a wide range of multi-disciplinary skills, clever design, engineering skills and offering a tailored design and build, we help companies to develop their capability while keeping them at the forefront of technical and industrial innovation,” he explained.
bmi’s business is all about service. Over the past 20 years they have delivered a wide range of projects to their diverse clients and waste environmental projects from large Government bodies to waste disposal companies, and to clients across the UK and as far afield as Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Africa and Poland to name a few. Over the years, bmi has been exporting trailers to countries across Europe and Africa and have most recently formed a partnership with reputable dealer networks across Australia which brings many exciting opportunities for their export sales team.
The company’s core business is the waste and recycling market offering high quality transfer trailers that are designed and manufactured at the head office in Dungannon. Also, offering Walking Floor and tipping trailers.
“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. Our trailers are better built, stronger and designed to withhold UK and Irish waste, which is renowned to be a heavier and bulkier waste compared to European waste profiles,” Brendan continued.
”One of the key successes of our company is our hard work, we have a great team, we have also carved out a niche product and we are steps ahead in our engineering capabilities and our designs. We have a dedicated R&D team who are tasked with a pro-active and blue sky thinking approach to keep them one step ahead. 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 technology. Brendan explained: “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. 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.”
Brendan added: “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. 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 recruiting more skilled engineering staff and production staff to be based at the Dungannon facility. A new office complex is under construction at Dungannon which will accommodate administration, marketing, sales, design and engineering teams.