Paul Yeates is Head of Technical for the Construction Accessories Division of SIG, and this team provides a unique support function for their business.
As a distributor of many specialist fixings, they assess site challenges with customers and determine which of their wide selection of manufacturer products is best placed to provide a solution. It’s an unbiased service that they offer, providing product solutions at early design stages in the project, and it’s proving to be invaluable for a growing number of customers, especially within the Major Projects and Infrastructure market.
The array of products and challenges that Paul and the Technical team assist with on-site differentiate them from other distributors. So we talked to Paul about these challenges, the importance of specialist fixings, and their range of products.
Paul Yeates has 27 years of experience in the Fixings market, having previously worked for Fischer and, more latterly, Rawlplug, two major manufacturer players in this sector. SIG provides commodity fixings from their branches daily, but Paul and his team provide a more technical approach. They focus on larger projects looking at the specification for a job and offering the right fixings solution for the application and potentially saving costs for the client, but always ensuring there is no reduction in performance or integrity.
There is a lot at stake with most of the specialist fixings Paul deals with providing critical support for something within the structure of a building. Whether they be bonding anchors or mechanical anchors, or masonry screws, they all have a job to do, and with many players in the market offering great solutions, it is a complex task to understand where best value can be obtained. Changing specs can be a risk to a design engineer, but it can be done, providing that critical checks, training and testing are carried out to ensure that the proposed solution works prior to rollout.
There are some impressive manufacturing suppliers in the specialist fixings arena that SIG work with and more niche suppliers to fill the product gaps and offer some great innovative solutions. Whilst Paul and his team are the key point of contact for their customers, they often bring in these specialist fixings manufacturers to provide additional technical support.
The fixings technical team is increasingly involved in the very early design stages of a project, dealing with the design engineers in civil departments. Here, it is not about having to look at alternative solutions to those already specified; it is about gaining the specification as they are often shown the designs and asked to provide a fixing to do a very specific job. Sometimes that means that the designers have to go back to the drawing board when there is not a fixing that will work in a particular setting. However, Paul and his team thrive in an environment where designers can discuss what they want to achieve and ask for recommendations on how they can do it with a particular fixing.
The Technical Team can not only offer a number of different supplier product solutions to a client, but they also install fixings to provide ‘Proof tests’ that show the anchor will work in the substrate and ‘Suitability tests’ that test the substrate to show the load on the anchor. As a Construction Fixings Association (CFA) accredited tester, Paul is often asked to do ‘Pullout tests’ to show load bearing on fixings, too.
Knowing that 85% of fixing failures are down to installation, they also provide bespoke contractor training on best practices on-site for a specific fixing solution. All training and technical support is offered free of charge as part of their service but it is important in driving business growth and encouraging designers to trust the service they offer.
“It seems to work as a growing number of Tier One contractors trust this specialist team,” Paul explained, “and are satisfied with the technical proof supplied, and are making huge savings on large contracts.”
They are now regularly working with design, consultant, civil and structural engineers who are engaging in works for the likes of Balfour Beatty, Siemens Energy and others on projects including Data Centres, Sub Stations and HS2.
Paul likes to keep what they offer simple in a complex arena:
“The key is understanding the application, speaking to the customer and coming up with the right system or solution to overcome the problem or application. The benefit of working with the CA Division is that we can offer an unbiased solution; we are not beholden to one brand.
“We are also very large in scale and find that as a result of providing a fixings solution in the early stages, we usually end up providing solutions for other key areas that can currently be troublesome for design engineers, that of Cable Entry and ducting and Geotextiles.
“I think the service we offer is unique, every project requires a bespoke solution and I don’t know of any other construction distributor that provides a service in such depth across so many products.”
Paul explains that some incumbent products in the cable entry market allow water ingress, which adds remedial costs to some substations.
“Having spent a lot of time training with our supplier, Hauff Technik, they are able to offer a solution that guarantees a watertight system,” Paul said.
The fixings range offered by the Construction Accessories Division is extensive as they source from many manufacturers to provide a solution. As they build knowledge and experience of different challenges faced on site, they search constantly for technical solutions to bring to market. They also offer a full technical service from design to onsite support, toolbox talks training and onsite testing, all free of charge. So if you have a project that needs fixings, please get in touch with:
Paul Yeates
National Technical Fixings Manager
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 07977639929
