CDE Global continue to develop new products and expand their business

The HUB visits N.Ireland... 

The HUB-4 team went along to visit the head office and production facility at CDE Global in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone. With two very close operating sites and 230 staff, CDE Global have seen impressive growth over the past few years and have plans to expand even further with a new office development to accommodate their growing workforce.

We caught up with Peter Craven, Head of Marketing who told us more “Our business model at CDE is that we provide custom solutions to clients through a consultative process. This gives us the advantage of having greater technical capability and an in-depth insight into how our customers work as our technical engineers are in daily contact with them. Nothing is lost in translation and the same technical and service engineers go out to site to see the client, solving any issues and progressing the build.”

“We have a broad product range, with 14 core machines currently available for a variety of applications. The majority are produced from our Headquarters, with some Asia based clients being looked after from our new facility in India. Within Northern Ireland we have a very good cost base, capability and expertise are very high, and we have a network of high quality and reliable fabricators and suppliers. Currently the UK provides 25% of our business, 25% across Europe and Russia, 10% USA, 10% Latin America and 10% across Australia.

We are promoting CDE on a global basis and so will continue to increase our share of international sales. Our growth has seen a 30% year on year increase over the past 4 years and this has been managed sustainably by the management team here, last year as a group we turned over around £52m.”

Peter showed us around the assembly facility. CDE use highly specialised suppliers within the local area to produce the main components for their equipment, and these include highly skilled fabricators who have supplied them for many years and manufacture to specific CDE designs. The facility at CDE is one of final assembly, quality control and testing, and means that CDE can use their facility to assemble many more machines and plant.

Peter commented “Our expertise is in the design of the plants and equipment, and our selling point is that everything is built on a bespoke basis for our clients, right from the ground up, and this allows us to make the very best use of our facility here. The space has been designed with plenty of height too, to accommodate everything right up to the largest in our range, such as the M2500. We are also going to build a new office development so that we can move everyone in there and free up our current office space for a brand new training centre, allowing us to provide detailed on-site training for our clients’ operations staff and also our CDEnviro brand clients.”

CDE have developed a brand new range of fourteen Infinity Screens ™ which were launched this year at Bauma. These innovative patented screens have been designed to remove as many welds from the structure as possible, and feature a unique honeycomb sidewall design which has three layers to make it lightweight, durable and long lasting.

Peter explained “We’ve been manufacturing screens for over 15 years, but people don’t associate us with them, so the Infinity Screen ™ range has been an important launch for us. We wanted to understand the main problem with traditional welded screen manufacture and then develop a solution that would solve that problem industry wide. This allows us to look at the screen replacement market to start supplying replacement screens to both existing and new clients. It also opens a door for us with new clients into our full range of wash plant products. The Infinity Screen ™ is also incorporated into all of our M series mobile wash plants, R series scalping screens, Evowash and sand washing plants.”

“There is a perception in the market that CDE are the people who only supply the £2m to £3m turn-key plants, but the truth is that we can supply anything from a £15,000 - £20,000 screen right up to a £10m to £15m project, anywhere in the World.”

Mark Ballantine, Senior R&D Engineer talked further about the Infinity Screens “We wanted to think about screening from the ground up and the fundamentals of what screening actually is. It is simple in essence, you can think of screening as a large vibrating box, but what we wanted to do was look at all the weaknesses associated with welds, areas of high stress leading to cracking fatigue, and failure down the line. After a lot of research, development and extensive testing of designs, we came up with Trilogy side wall construction. This eliminates welds, has a bolted construction but has the strength and mass in the screen where its required, so its structurally efficient being stiff where necessary. This design reduces wear on bearings and maximises the life of the screen.”

Chris Hillis, Technical Engineer outlined a little more about the CDE sales process around washing plants “Every sales enquiry that we have comes through the technical department here at CDE, and each enquiry is then managed by the same person from start to finish, the structure of the team allows each person to become a specialist in a specific area of our business. We also have an in-market technical team based in key regions in and with everyone fully trained by CDE to a level of technical excellence so that they can advise the client correctly from a technical viewpoint.We also test the material that the client is using by means of our on-site testing lab, existing client test data or a testing facility local to the project. We would also send a technical engineer out to site for a full site visit if we feel that is required as it is vital that everything is handled correctly at this early stage of a project.”

“The construction and demolition recycling market has been very busy for us with projects in many different parts of the world, and we have worked hard to come up with a solid base-line for the type of material that we might expect to find in each country, as this varies quite a lot. This level of experience from CDE allows us to provide the correct washing solution for our clients globally.”

For more information on CDE Global and the whole product range, please call +44 28 8676 7900 or visit www.cdeglobal.com

Associated Businesses

  • CDE is the global leader in materials wet processing technology, with almost 2,000 wet processing projects delivered in over 100 countries across the world. Through it’s purpose “Championing Sustainability To Create A New Wor...