Testimonials

Working to Strengths

While AIE has its own engineering customers it also works collaboratively with other engineering companies all around New Zealand. Those companies come to AIE because they need to meet tight timeframes or perhaps, they don’t have the equipment and skillset for a specific job, or the room and lift capacity.

An example of collaborative effort is a project for Lyttelton Engineering that was part of a larger project to build and supply a six-megawatt boiler for a new packaging factory in Christchurch.

Senior Mechanical Engineer Michael Smith from Lyttelton Engineering says he opted to use AIE to drill a large number of holes in the boiler drums that are key to the efficient manufacture of a boiler. Lyttelton could have done the work themselves but it would have taken up a lot of space and taken time that could be better used on other aspects of the project. Instead, they trucked the boiler drums to AIE and in three weeks they were back.

“It was a more efficient way of managing the project to outsource that work to AIE, and the type of work was well suited to the set up AIE has.

Smith says quality in this case is measured by accuracy of the positioning, size, and finish of the holes – it’s quite important for the manufacture of the boiler that the holes are all in the right place. All 1657 holes were accurately done so the overall job quality was very good.

Lyttelton Engineering first started working with AIE when they had another boiler project with tight timelines.

“We needed to outsource the drilling otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to meet the timelines. It worked well for us so we have had confidence since then that we would get a good result.”

He says dealing with AIE has been positive as they were professional, communication was very good, and cost was fair in terms of industry expectations.