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IRELANd

ISSUE 1 2010

Door-to-door service will benefit Ulster aircraft builder

Ireland will have to wait a little longer yet for a direct ocean connection to North America. US-based Trans Atlantic Liner Services (TALS) had hoped to launch a service last November, but does not now expect to include Belfast on its transatlantic routing before late May. Peter Bouwhuis, director of TALS,

says: “We have started a service from Antwerp to Montreal and Baltimore. We’re not calling Belfast yet because shippers have not committed. Everything has been a bit delayed, but it’s looking good for the next month or so.” The Irish Exporters Association has

been pushing for a direct connection for a number of years in collaboration with major shippers such as Diageo, Waterford Crystal and Bombardier, to reduce dependence on feeder services via the UK mainland and northern Europe. But with volumes down, the question is whether a regular service can pay its way. TALS aims to serve Ireland fortnightly,

carrying large equipment for the North American market as well as project cargoes, breakbulk, containerised and ro-ro traffic. Under a long-term service agreement with BBC Chartering, the line can “plug in a variety of vessels”, Bouwhuis says. He believes the most

first of the month and mid-month. A primary target is clearly Canadian

aircraft builder Bombardier Aerospace, which has been present in Belfast for more than 20 years since acquiring Short Brothers. The company is the largest manufacturer in Northern Ireland, employing 5,000 people, and has become one of the UK’s leading aerospace companies after investing £1.3 billion

plant in Montreal and 16 days to the Learjet facility in Wichita, Kansas. A direct service to

Montreal would reduce shipping time to nine days, and Cowan hopes the prospect of more frequent shipments from Bombardier helps build the business case.

“Ideally it would be a ro-ro service, but lo-lo vessels with their own cranes could also do the job,” he says. The Belfast site

makes more than 5,200 export deliveries a year, from “confetti items” such as bolts and rivets to fuselages over 20 metres long. But things could ramp up significantly for

Bombardier’s

Bombardier has begun testing on a full-scale, three-quarter span composite wing for the new CSeries aircraft

in new plant, product development and training. Bombardier

produces

CRJ900 fuselage assembly

suitable will be a multi-purpose self- geared tweendecker with minimum 125 tonne lifting capacity, which he envisages would depart Belfast on the

fuselages, engine nacelle systems, wings and flight control surfaces for aircraft including the Learjet, Challenger and Global business jets, the Q400 turboprop and the 70-seat CRJ700, 86-seat CRJ900 and 100-seat CRJ1000 regional jets. It also supplies nacelle components to Rolls- Royce and General Electric for Airbus and Boeing engines. Stephen Cowan, Belfast- based general manager of

the supply chain and of Bombardier’s Hawlmark sheet metal fabrication unit, says shipments currently take 13 days to reach Bombardier’s main assembly

next major launch, the CSeries aircraft, which will serve the

single-aisle 100- to 145-seat market. The former Shorts unit in Belfast port, with almost 40 years of experience in advanced composites, has designed the wings for the new aircraft using an innovative resin transfer infusion process.

Bombardier is building a new

55,000sq m plant to produce the wings. It will dispatch its first test wing to Mirabel, Quebec, where the CSeries will be assembled, next year. The aircraft will fly from 2013 and if the CSeries is a commercial success, Belfast could be building five wing sets a week. Bombardier works with 800-plus

suppliers, subcontractors and service providers. Over the last year, the company awarded contracts worth around £180m to CSeries suppliers including GKN Aerospace, which will

CRJ900 fuselage being lifted onto a transporter for despatch

Belfast or direct to the assembly line each week, 1,500 from external suppliers and 3,000 internal deliveries such as sheet metal and composite parts. An additional parts hub somewhere close to the port will be needed as the CSeries programme develops. Bombardier holds 43,000 stock-

keeping units, picking around 25,000 items a week for final assembly – a

Wind power spin-off boosts QF

Quality Freight Group (QF) is capitalising on the growing interest in wind power through its new Renewable Logistics division, launched in December. “We spun it out of the project cargo

work we have been involved in,” says group MD Trevor Dumbleton. “We’re part of PPG [Project Professionals Group, the global project forwarder network] and a lot of our US colleagues are involved in wind energy. We’re still at the fact-finding stage, and seeing where logistics fits into this sector.” Meanwhile, QF has set up a joint venture with Connect Logistics in Belfast. “We had

operated there since 1994 but needed to boost our image, and renewables is already quite a big sector there,” Dumbleton says. Connect Logistics Northern Ireland is headed

by Roger Barham, who has returned to QF after five years away. He is a shareholder in the business together with Eamon Sullivan, former terminal director for Peel Ports in Dublin and Belfast. In Dublin, both QF and Connect Logistics are

based at the Port Centre. Connect is Irish agent for Cardiff Container Line, which operates a twice-weekly service to Dublin and added a Warrenpoint service at the end of March.

CRJ1000 fuselage being lifted out of the assembly jig for despatch

produce winglets at its composites centre on the Isle of Wight, and Cytec in Wrexham, a supplier of advanced composite materials. Two 3PLs, both with on-site teams,

manage inbound supplies of materials and sub-components. Manfast covers the UK and Europe while UPS handles the rest of the world, chiefly the US and Mexico. Around 4,500 batches are delivered into 12 warehouses around

figure that was twice as high at the pre-recession peak of the market. “The economic crisis

led us to sharpen our inventory,” Cowan says. “Suppliers would send us materials and invoice us, but now we have set up an advance shipping notification system as in the automotive industry, where we tell them what

we want. It operates through a portal – it’s not paper based. We piloted this with US suppliers and we will roll it out across the rest of our vendor base this year.” The company has also been forced

to review its despatch procedures following a costly episode last year when two fuselages on the top deck of a vessel en route to Canada became exposed to the elements and had to be written off.

Fuselages are

transported on padded foam trolleys and covered with padded tarpaulin. Bombardier is strengthening the corners of the trolleys and is investigating the idea of an impact hoop at either end to reduce the risk of damage.

The company also

now takes photographs of all shipments before and after wrapping and at each major milestone in the despatch process

so that if problems arise, the source can be identified. “We had to improve our governance,” Cowan says. The revolutionary CSeries wing is

“a very different construction” and will need particular care in packing and shipping, he emphasises, again underlining the importance of a direct service. The less intermediate handling, the better. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36