Karratha-based surveying contractor Handley Surveys has beaten back some big players in the Western Australia to earn recognition at the State’s Telstra Business Awards earlier this year.
The company won the medium-sized business category, which encompasses enterprises with between 20 and 200 employees.
With only 28 employees, Handley had to compete against some much larger businesses.
“We were up against some really high-calibre companies, some of which in very similar industries,” the company’s general manager Alex Handley told Australian Mining.
“I think the culture of the company was the thing that really differentiated us from the others.
“As a family-based company, we have really worked hard to extend that culture and atmosphere to our clients and staff.”
Winning the Western Australian Award qualified the company for the national finals, which were held late last month.
While contractor did not take out the national award, which was awarded to Canberra IT security consultant Stratsec, Handley said it was a pleasant surprise to get as far as they did.
The company provides specialist surveying services to the resources industry and the major infrastructure construction sector.
“Our core business is surveying for specialist mechanical erection contracts,” Handley said.
“We also do the entire range of surveying services, such as cadastral work and topographic mapping but mechanical erection is the main focus.
“We can provide dimensional control surveying for modular construction projects as well.”
The company is heavily involved in the construction of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plants on the west coast of Australia and has worked with Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton on iron ore expansion projects.
“I think there has only been one Australian LNG plant in the last ten years that we were not been involved with,” Handley said.
“A lot of our success in Karratha has been due to the fact we relocated our head office up here and that we were close to the industry.
“If there is an LNG plant being built in Australia, we are definitely there talking to all the major players in the industry, such as Chevron, BHP and Woodside.“
Some of the larger projects the contractor has worked on in the past, include Woodside’s North-West Shelf Joint Venture and the Woodside-Burrup Pluto LNG plant, which both featured modular construction.
According to Handley, the company has also taken its expertise to the mining industry on a number of occasions.
“We were involved in Rio’s Parker Point jetty duplication project in late-2005, which involved turning a single-bay vessel-loading facility in to a four-bay facility with screen houses and conveyor belts and the like,” he said.
“We were involved in the fine-tuning of all the mechanical equipment, such as making sure all the conveyor belts were aligned.
“We are actually about to start some very similar work for BHP for the Rapid Growth Project Five at Port Hedland.”
The company will be sending six of it surveys to carry out mechanical erection tasks and conveyor alignments for a new load-out facility at the site.
“They are also building a new jetty, so there is machinery like ship-loaders and the like that need to be set up and fine-tuned,” Handley said.
A technical edge
Handley believes the company’s use of innovative technology has allowed it to achieve a level of accuracy and productivity, which in turn helped it bring home the Business Award.
“We have a really close relationship with Trimble, which is one of two main surveying equipment manufacturers in the world,” he said.
“That relationship has allowed us to have some input in the next phases of equipment and software design.
“Our entire fleet of surveying equipment is made up of world-best fully-robotic instruments, which allows us to run one man survey crews.”
Handley said these units have an angular accuracy down to one second, while many other companies use gear with an accuracy of two to three seconds.
“We are also moving into three-dimensional laser scanning,” he said.
“We were one of the first five companies in the world to purchase a Trimble FX laser scanner, which provides a full three-dimensional map of whatever you are measuring.
“It has a data capture rate of 190,000 points per second and accuracy down to one millimetre.”
When there are downtimes between contracts, the company invests in staff training to make sure all employees are up to speed with any new equipment.
The contractor actually built a specialised training room that can take up to 40 people for that exact reason.
“As soon as something is released by Trimble, we will acquire it and carry out training for three to six months and then roll it out to our clients,” Handley said.
“We often get trainers out from the Perth and Sydney as well as from France and the US to ensure our guys are experts in the use of the equipment.
“We also have knowledge database so individual surveyors can share some of the different techniques they may pick up on their projects.”
Growing with the industry
The company is looking to capitalise on the rapidly growing LNG industry by gaining a foothold its most exciting frontier, Queensland.
The contractor has offices on the Gold Coast and in Townsville and hopes the experience and expertise gained in Western Australia will attract clients.
“We are one of only a few companies in Australia that actually have the skills to work on LNG plants,” Handley said.
“A lot of different companies out there say they can, but they have not really had any experience in it.
“We know there are 10 to 12 LNG trains scheduled to start-up in Queensland over the next 10 to 15 years, so we are trying to position ourselves so we can pre-empt some market decisions and get a jump on those opportunities.”
Handley also operates an office in Thailand and is also exploring the possibility of work for the Papua New Guinea LNG project.