Sigrist Design – A Brief History of an Australian owned Technology Business
Raptair
The release internally of the Raptair fan selection tool brings substantial scalability to the business. When combined with internal control tools like DinoRider it resulted in a more than doubling of quote output. This was followed by the public release of Raptair to estimators, contractors and engineering design consultants. Read more about Raptair here.
DinoRider
DinoRider was developed by the Sigrist team to take the data generated by Raptair and provide the tools to complete the scalability that boosts Sigrist for the coming years.
A brief summary of DinoRider functions includes:
Quality checking
– data sheets generation, NCC compliance and key design factors like correct motors on smoke spill fans, correct features on kitchen and carpark exhaust etc.
Lead times
– real time lead times for each item including allowance for public holidays, alternate suppliers. This includes the ability to identify supply chain constraints to allow redirecting of purchasing to alternative sources.
Pricing
Allows pricing at the non-manufactured and manufactured levels, then splitting to product groups and finally down to individual products. This includes list prices adjustment tools to show margin, adjusted margin and applied discounts. Historical reference quotes can be used for consistency across bundled projects. Finally to give overall project value and achieved margin.
Reporting
Quote report for the customer and engineering summary report for the consulting engineer are the most common reports used.
Supply chain reports are available for sending to the customer to plan their deliveries timeline for their project.
Production control and supply chain management
The schedule management tool allows the splitting of a project into batches, such a per building level, in combination with the control of the content of each batch and the planned delivery dates. This tool also identifies shipped items and remaining items on an order in real time.
The production pipelines are integrated to the supply chain tools so changes in planned delivery dates are reflected at the production line in real time.
Sigrist Design has built and sustained a reputation over more than 30 years for high quality, robust and well engineered equipment manufactured in Queensland, Australia.
Sigrist Design – A Brief History of the legacy manufacturing business….
Established in 1989 by Robert Sigrist this Australian Owned Manufacturing business originally focused on installing and refurbishment of imported ventilation and dust management systems and now has transformed to a tech driven LEAN production system.
Within about 10 years the business expanded to design, manufacture and installation of fans, ventilation and dust management solutions.
Diversification into the higher volume production of fans for the building construction HVAC market commenced about 10 years ago and led to the recruitment of a full design engineering team.
In 2018 the business was taken over by private investors when Robert Sigrist retired from daily operations and continued as a consultant for several years.
The new owners invested in the transition of this Australian owned manufacturing business from 2D CAD to 3D CAD for all products and focused the engineering team on “design for manufacture”. The new management team recruited key senior staff and engaged LEAN improvement specialists in 2019 to develop and implement substantial improvements in production systems and efficiency. Improvements like the full digitisation of the production control systems has resulted in strong gains in production capacity and operating efficiency.
The strategic objective of the new management has been to strengthen the foundation of the core business and seek acquisitions that add value to this core operation in related business segments. This was delayed by COVID and the supply chain challenges immediately following.
In 2024 the focus of the LEAN improvements shifted to the sales and administrative functions with the expansion of the in-house software development team. This has brought substantial gains in sales team efficiency and quoting ability.