According to a well-known adage: ’Success doesn’t come to you; you go to it.’ This very much applies to Vital Engineering, which has gone more than the extra mile to successfully complete the two largest gratings, handrail and stair tread supply contracts so far in Africa.
The contracts in question were to supply 100 000m2 of grating panels per power station; as well as some 70km of hand railing and over 8 000 stair treads to Eskom’s Medupi and Kusile power station projects.
To date, feedback from the client has been uniformly positive. “I would ascribe the success of these seamless supply contracts to Vital Engineering’s long history and experience of over 75 years of supplying to power generation projects both locally and internationally,” explains Dodds Pringle, Managing Director of Vital Engineering.
“Success breeds success and, on the back of these two massive contracts, we soon won various large mining, materials handling, food and beverage and infrastructural water treatment, bridge and shopping centre contracts,” Pringle explains.
He adds that many of Vital Engineering’s products were used in these projects: from GRP or FRP fibreglass gratings and accessories, to mild or stainless steel and aluminium gratings, stair treads and expanded metals. Adding value to these products were Vital’s unique, copyrighted sealed unit tubular stanchions.
The stanchion product range comprises ball-type angle stanchions and solid forged stanchions, which were supplied with solid hand rails and bends to construct complete walkways. Safety was a key aspect in both the Eskom power station projects.
Vital Engineering strove to work proactively with the principal contractor, MHPSA (Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Africa), to meet and surpass specified quality and safety goals.
”Having said that, all the stringent safety procedures, systems and quality controls applied to the power station projects are also applied without fail to every other project which we undertake for our loyal and valued local and international client base,” Pringle explains.
“This ensures that our service levels and deliverables remain consistent. Furthermore, we have always adopted pre-emptive safety and quality practices, instead of leaving this responsibility solely to the main contractor,” he continues.
“To the best of our knowledge, we are the only ISO 9001 design-related grating, handrail and expanded metal manufacturer in Southern Africa; and our checks and balances regarding our product performance and safety ensure that our customers have peace of mind at all times,” he adds.
