Recovery under way, but government help needed
August 12th 2011 Chris Dee, executive director of BCAS (British Compressed Air Society) talks to AirUser, about the compressed air industry in general and the benefits a trade association can offer its members in uncertain times
Chris Dee believes that the compressed air industry in 2011 is in a positive shape. From the statistical monitoring schemes that BCAS undertake (illustrated by the graphs that accompany this article), it appears that in all sectors – whether it’s sales of units or service or maintenance – through 2011 there has been an increase.
Dee comments: “Predictions were made at the beginning of the recession and we expect to realise those towards the end of 2011/beginning of 2012 when the industry will have recovered. Probably it won’t recover to where it was pre-2008, but it will recover a good 30 to 40% of what it lost during 2009/10.
Recovery might be under way but Chris Dee firmly believes that the government is still not doing enough to help industry. Asked what form of help he feels the government should be giving, he says: “I would like to see them enforcing the regulations and standards that they’ve already got in place. There’s a lot of talk about unfair competition, about counterfeit parts, about copy parts.The border controls are already in place, but they’re not being enforced. Countries waiting to come into the European Union must tighten up their border controls, otherwise non-genuine parts, counterfeit parts and suspect parts will just flood the market and unfortunately some end users at the moment, in trying to reduce their costs, are buying them over and above the genuine parts and they’re paying the price at a later date.
Asked whether the role of a Trade Association has to change when times are tough, Chris Dee says: “Trade Associations are continually evolving. When times are difficult the role of a trade association doesn’t change as such, but it certainly becomes more important. The best way I can describe this is that if a company is trading excessively well and they’re raising their prices or closing their order books, then you might hear them say well why should they be a member of a trade association? They’re making a profit and they’re doing everything they want. In the current climate, though, when many companies are having to struggle because, for example, they’ve relocated and a lot of technical expertise has gone abroad, manufacturing has gone abroad, and maybe they’ve only got a sales office left in the UK, they still have to make sure that everything they do is correct. The cost of mistakes is increasing all the time. The role of the trade association then does become more of a key part of their survival strategy and we’ve seen that reflected in our membership numbers. Our members are benefitting from the credibility the BCAS badge offers and their customers are benefitting from using BCAS members.
"Our membership over the last 10 years has grown faster than in any other decade in our 80 year history to record levels.”
Chris Dee acknowledges that consolidation within the industry, as within any other industry, is happening and BCAS has responded to this by bringing in new categories of membership. So now, as organisations grow through acquisition, all of their companies – if they’re compressed air related – can benefit from group membership.
At a time when companies are looking to cut costs, it is surprising to learn from BCAS that many users of compressed air do not know how much their system costs to operate, nor how to perform the calculations. Dee attributes this to the relatively low cost of electricity at present.
He comments: “The price of energy is going up and I’m sure that sooner rather continued from page 8 than later it will reach a level at which people who are using electricity in whatever form will take a much closer look at it and say ‘are we getting good value?’ The question as to how to calculate the true cost of compressed air is still probably the one we get asked the most because there are many different ways of calculating it.
Dee remains optimistic for the future of the compressed air industry. He says: “Compressed air, as with electricity, is one of those forms of energy that’s used in every different enterprise that you can think of, from a food company to a Formula 1 car company to a nuclear power industry to a little industrial unit underneath the railway arches. All of these are visited by what I often feel is the under-rated compressed air service engineer. They all use compressed air, and it is the task of the service engineer to understand their individual needs so as to maintain the versatility, reliability, cost effectiveness and, above all, the safety of the compressed air system.
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