Modern Quarrying April May 2015

SUPPLIER SPOTLIGHT

New Middleburg facility on track

operations. It has also been designed for regional growth and, as the staff comple- ment increases over time, this will cre- ate employment opportunities for local people.” Babcock is the exclusive regional dis- tributor of Volvo Construction Equipment and the Volvo A40F dump truck accounts for the biggest portion of the Volvo con- struction and mining machines marketed locally by Babcock. www.babcock.co.za

Babcock is on schedule for the August 2015 completion of a brand new, bespoke facility for the construction equipment business unit inMiddelburg, Mpumalanga. The R100-million development has been initiated to offer world-class product sup- port, across Babcock’s entire construction equipment product range, to customers throughout the region. Construction on the 30 000 m 2 site began in August last year. The state-of- the-art facility will comprise 12 large workshop bays with overhead cranage of up to 40 t, dedicated washing bays for yellow metal vehicles, an industrial spray booth, a steel fabrication section for dump truck repairs and 900 m of office space. The new buildings incorporate sustainable, energy-efficient design fea- tures aligned with global best practice. “A substantial portion of our cus- tomer base is in the coal mining sec- tor in this region,” says project manager Michael de Weijer. “We’ve had a presence in Middelburg for the past ten years and

we felt it was the right time to build a modern facility capable of meeting cur- rent customer needs and accommodating future growth. “The new facility has been designed specifically to suit our business. It has built-in operational intelligence in the form of efficient flow between the parts warehouse, the workshop and the work bays, to ensure safe and streamlined

Artist’s impression of the state-of-the-art Middelburg facility.