RMD Industries Pty Ltd: Productivity Solutions with Great Results
RMD Industries embodies four manufacturing and distribution businesses – Brio, Downee, Pratco and Ductware – built on a strong and proud history that dates back to 1953. Ductware is a new division of RMD Industries and has already established itself as a leader with longevity.
Brio is based in Sydney with sales offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. This division designs and manufactures architectural sliding and folding door hardware for Australian and overseas markets including America, Europe and Asia. Brio previously traded as Henderson RMD.
Downee, which previously traded as RMD Metal Products has a high speed metal pressing manufacturing facility at Sunshine and sales and warehouse operations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland.The Downee product range includes gate automation systems, fence fittings and sliding door and track systems for the commercial, domestic and rural markets. New product ranges include stainless steel fittings for glass fencing and balustrading and modular glass fencing and balustrade systems.
Pratco manufactures sugar cane harvester blades, lawn cutting blades and trencher teeth for mining equipment. Pratco has manufacturing facilities in Brisbane, Queensland and is a significant exporter and OEM supplier of cane harvester blades worldwide.
Ductware
Ductware supplies the heating, ventilation and air conditioning industry in all Australian States with hardware for the manufacture and installation of ducting systems. Ductware manufactures some product locally and is the exclusive distributor for industry leaders, Ductmate, Gripnail, Shurtape and Rossi.
Ductware's focus is on providing productivity solutions that have green results for the HVAC duct manufacturing and installation industries. “Our aim is to provide the HVAC market with a range of hardware and accessory products that are focused very clearly on solutions to help solve the productivity issues in manufacturing – getting more manufactured duct out the door and then getting the ducting installed,” says Ductware’s General Manager Michael Hadley. “We also want to address some of the contemporary environmental issues and contribute a greater degree of energy efficiency, particularly preventing leakage in ducts, thereby providing green results when possible.”
Competitive Advantage
Ductware has established a different approach to duct manufacturing, providing innovative solutions that improve productivity through labour savings, whilst also offering pragmatic, cost-neutral green building options. A new supplier to the HVAC market, Ductware sells an innovative range of ducting hardware and accessory products designed to optimise productivity in the manufacturing of the duct.
“The products we represent are from manufacturers who really lead the world in innovation, developed though research and development activity”, says Hadley. “The evolution has been the growth of our product range. Most of it has been on the basis of innovation and responding to market or customer needs and also geographic footprint. We're trying to be innovative, to be very focused on development and to finding out what customers actually want and developing products that suit those needs.”
Intense Focus on Client-based Needs
RMD and Ductware use various forms of market research, ‘trade focus,’ where the Company focuses on the specific needs of the trade customers. “We ask them what they want in terms of price and product and processes and what they want to buy and then figure out ways to get it to them, a win-win,” explains Hadley.
This trade focus helped make it possible for Ductware to develop Australia's first 50mm-deep access panel. This panel provides access to a duct for inspection of certain aspects. A 50mm-deep access panel, which the Company developed the tooling for, enables up to a 50mm external or internal insulation to be neatly fitted up against the panel without any interference or disturbance of the air stream, thereby reducing turbulence in the air flow. It also enables a higher “R-value” for the access panel itself, which is a thermal insulation issue. “Our panels can achieve a higher R-value than any other access panel on the market, addressing a key issues that customers are now concerned about - which is why we developed it,” says Hadley. “The design of the tooling is something we were closely involved with, a product that we've only just recently released as a result of research and development and a very detailed trade-focus campaign.”
Powerful New Opportunities
Through continued trade focus, research and development, Ductware has some exciting new opportunities, including a newly innovated range of “LongNeck” Bellmouth Spigots which the Company has developed, again through extensive trade focused market research.
“Another new innovation is that we now supply Erico/Caddy duct installation hardware,” says Hadley. “It's widening the offer in the product sense but also in market sense because the customers for these types of products are primarily on-site mechanical contractors. There is some serious potential here to assist on-sire contractors to get duct installed much quicker. In addition, we have introduced the Shurtape Green-Star rated duct-tape.”
“Probably the major product range that contractors will be interested in is effectively a revolutionary new way to duct. The GreenSeam Snap Lock ducting system is an incredibly simple, self-sealing round duct system that has transformed many projects in the USA over the recent year since its introduction. We were lucky enough to have early access to this system and launched it on the Australian market just last year,” says Hadley.
Furthermore, Ductware is also building towards increased success through its capacitor discharge (CD) weld pins for fixing insulation to ducts. The Company has a wide-range of resistance, dielectric coated and capacitor-discharge (CD) Weld Pins for affixing duct insulation.
Hadley addressed a vital point that highlights why RMD and its companies continue to move forward in this industry: “We don’t get distracted by competition – we really just hope to focus more on our customers’ needs, which enables us to keep ahead of competition by simply listening to our customers, hopefully better than others. And we try to continually keep our customers’ costs down through tangible productivity improvements, while maintaining high quality.”
