A H I S T O R Y O F SUCCESS
2 | Cullen Steel Fabrications
Cullen Steel Fabrications | 3 Founded around 1930, Cullen Steel is one of the longest established steel fabrication companies in Australia. Over the course of their extensive history, they have refined their skills by working in a variety of markets – including mining, multi-level commercial, industrial, public infrastructure and more. “We do work for almost anybody, but we concentrate on medium-to-large buildings,” says Ron Barrington, the company’s Managing Director. “We’re driven by our commitment to delivering exactly what the client has ordered. Our clients can hand us a job and not worry about it, because they know we’ll look after it.” Barrington began his longstanding career at Cullen Steel in 1970. Before joining the company, he worked as a Project Manager for Jaques – a Victorian-based manufacturer of mining equipment that had purchased Cullen Steel many years earlier. Another group called Clyde Industries took over Cullen Steel in the late 1970s, and in 1986, Barrington and a few of his colleagues decided to purchase the company for themselves. The business has progressed from there.
4 | Cullen Steel Fabrications “I’d been there 16 years already and I knew the place like the back of my hand,” says Barrington, explaining what made him want to take the leap to ownership. “And I knew the industry extremely well, so I knew I could be successful.” Today, Cullen Steel operates out of a modern facility in Ingleburn. They work for a variety of customers, including some of the most prominent companies in Australia – companies such as Lend Lease, Multiplex, Richard Crookes and A W Edwards. Their projects include detail drafting, shop fabrication, welding, surface treatment, painting, delivery onsite erection and QA documentation of the structural steel. Throughout every stage of a project, Cullen Steel coordinates and works closely with the builder. According to Barrington, that focus on collaboration is one of two major factors that set the company apart in the steel fabricating market. The other factor, he says, is the skill and loyalty of their staff. “We have a pretty dedicated team that runs the company, and we’ve got a pretty dedicated workforce,” he says. “We don’t experience a lot of turnover in our workforce –most of the people who work here have been with the company even longer than I have.” “When you have a good thing, you like to stick to it,” he adds. “About half of our employees did their apprenticeship in the company, so they’ve been here since they left school, and they’ll probably end up retiring in the company.” Everybody that works at Cullen Steel takes pride in what they do, Barrington says. At the conclusion of a project, the team often goes out to see the finished product, and the company always passes on the kind words they receive from the clients. Macquarie Bank Sydney
Cullen Steel Fabrications | 5
6 | Cullen Steel Fabrications “Our guys are quite proud that they’ve been involved in something that’s a success – they’re not just factory workers churning out widgets every day.” Cullen Steel also fosters loyalty in the relationships they form with suppliers. When they win a job, Barrington says their suppliers can rely on the fact that they have won the job as well. As a result of those strong relationships, Cullen Steel is able to occasionally call up favours and get better assistance than they would have if they shopped around. THE RIGHT WAY Cullen Steel also fosters exceptional relationships with their clients – many of whom, like their employees, are longstanding. Barrington credits that customer longevity to the company’s communication skills. Throughout a project, clients are consistently given updates on progress, which gives them confidence. And if an issue comes up along the way, it is quickly brought up, discussed, and resolved. Barrington further credits Cullen Steel’s repeat business to the simple fact that they are very good at what they do. Time and time again, they have proven that they can deliver high quality steel without defects. “We’ve pretty much figured out the right way to do things and we stick to it,” he explains. “We get a job, we grab hold of it with both hands, we break it down into components and we execute it with precision.” “People tend to like the way we approach a job, and they come back to us again and again.” Typically, when Cullen Steel receives an
Cullen Steel Fabrications | 7 Companies such as Cullen Steel Fabrications are helping drive a revolution in structural steel design with the LYSAGHT SUPAPURLIN®. Australian made LYSAGHT SUPAPURLIN®’s are the rst real development in purlin design in many years. So unique and revolutionary is the SUPAPURLIN® design that the unique SUPAZED® and SUPACEE® purlin prooles have been patented by BlueScope Lysaght. The difference between regular purlins and the LYSAGHT SUPAPURLIN® is obvious. Unique stiffening ribs running along the web of the purlin make it easy to identify a LYSAGHT SUPAPURLIN®. These ribs are at the core of the SUPAPURLIN®’s remarkable enhanced performance. By improving the structural performance of the web in bending and/or shear the SUPAPURLIN® is able to bear more weight and span greater distances than the traditional purlin. That means cost savings can be achieved either through reducing the gauge of purlin used, reducing the number of supports needed, reduced purlin rows or a combination of all these approaches. All LYSAGHT SUPAPURLIN®’s are manufactured from high strength GALVASPAN® steel, BlueScope Steel’s zinc coated steel product speciically designed for purlin applications. Available in a range of thicknesses and web depths to suit any project the LYSAGHT SUPAPURLIN® is the ideal product alternative for commercial and industrial building applications. For more information on the LYSAGHT SUPAPURLIN® and the full range of LYSAGHT® steel building products visit www.lysaght.com It’s the difference you can see order, they do the shop-drawings in-house. For that, the company employs several of their own draftsmen, all of whom are highly skilled and experienced and familiar with the way Cullen Steel does things. “We can watch every element of the job as its being developed and control it,” Barrington says, describing the advantage to their approach. “Part of the secret to getting good fabricated product out at the end is having good quality drawings at the beginning.” In recent years, Cullen Steel has applied their expert service to a number of high profile, iconic projects. One example of such is the Macquarie Bank in Sydney, where all the columns are external to the building, forming a diagrid structure which Cullen provided the steel for. The Star City Casino is another example – they recently
8 | Cullen Steel Fabrications added a multi-purpose entertainment facility, and Cullen did a large part of the steel on it. “We probably turn out about four to five thousand tonnes of steel a year, so we’re always involved in a lot of projects,” Barrington says. “We have a long list of one’s were proud of.” MEETING THE FUTURE Moving forward, Barrington says the company still wants to grow – which they are currently do-
Cullen Steel Fabrications | 9 ing, slowly and sustainably. Today, the main challenge to that growth is competing with cheaper imported product, which is mainly from China. To overcome that challenge, Barrington explains they are targeting more difficult projects, where quality trumps cost. “And imported product simply can’t compete with our quality,” he says. Cullen Steel is also streamlining their manufacturing processes by keeping up-to-date with technology. Today, Barrington says almost all of the company’s equipment utilises the latest technology available to the market, and they strive to make sure that’s always the case. Even today, they are looking at new equipment purchases and plan to expand their factory to accommodate them. “I think there’s always going to be room for us,” Barrington says. “I see Cullen Steel being here in another 70 years.”
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