BID emphasises the service plan for growth

BID Group describes itself as an industrial door service and repair company that ‘out of necessity’ has developed a manufacturing expertise. With its background firmly rooted in service, this has fostered the technical knowledge required to design and manufacture reliable, easy to maintain doors.

Sales manager Nigel Livesey explains how this is essentially driven by customer demand.

“Facilities managers need robust and easily maintained doors – they also want everything looked after by one supplier ideally, therefore regardless of the range and type of industrial doors they have bought or inherited in the past we will service them all.”

With a strong and broad-based repair and maintenance background, BID has built up a large database of generic parts that can be used for most industry specific door types thereby ironing out any compatibility issues.

“This is crucial in responding quickly,” explains Nigel. “If we are presented with a certain repair issue, we can use our database to find compatible generic parts giving swift economic solutions to our customers. At our head office in Bolton we have built up an extensive range of the most commonly required parts as we clearly recognise that downtime for our customers is expensive.”

BID has national coverage with 48 teams of engineers on call offering a 24/7 service. A four hour response time within normal working hours is usually achievable.

Nigel adds: “We have such great expertise in-house that it is not unusual for one of our experts to provide a solution (maybe interim) via the telephone.”

The company leans towards service contracts as a preferred model and says this gives the customer economic and safety benefits. When a customer takes out a service contract with BID they will compile a register of customer assets, thus providing vital background information should a breakdown occur, this helps greatly with first time fixes and reduces the down-time of the asset.

Nigel explains: “We have a contract with a major fire authority and if you look over the five years of its operation, the amount the client has needed to spend has decreased year-on-year as a direct result of the preventive maintenance we have put in place – the only thing we can’t legislate for is accidental damage.”

In recent years and at the request of its customers BID has also added the servicing and repair of loading bay equipment, such as dock shelters and levellers to its product offering.

A story of growth

In business for some 30 years, BID started out as a man in a van repairing industrial doors.

The company has grown steadily since the early days, with key milestones including the purchase of a Stoke-based door company Lycett 13 years ago, followed by the purchase of local industrial engineering company Leigh Lifting Group to improve manufacturing knowledge and capacity. The company then diversified  into perimeter security maintenance adding gates and barriers to its product offering. Five years ago the acquisition of Lowland Doors in Scotland helped the company develop national coverage and build turnover.

This growth and range of expertise has enabled the company to win major contracts, such as a national deal with a major supermarket chain and a contract with a well-known ports company, servicing in excess of 300 doors at facilities across the North.

Owner and managing director John Thompson says: “We have recently been through a period of consolidation following the acquisition of major national contracts. The ethos behind this being we will never take anything on until we are sure we can provide the level of service we need to. Coming out of this period now we will look to expand the national contracts side of our business.”

High speed doors

When BID Group started installing high speed doors back in the 1990s all the products were bought from external sources, however this approach was quickly abandoned due to reliability issues. Learning from economic and technical issues arising with these products BID commenced manufacturing their own high speed doors under the Klimate brand name – the ‘Ardent’ door for both ambient and chilled use and the ‘K2’ door for freezer applications.

Co-owner Mike Calderbank explains: “The customer requirement was for a robust and reliable door for the UK market which has very specific requirements. Doors tend to be external, need to put up with high winds, impact abuse and high usage. We emphasised a robust design that could take a hit and was easy to maintain.”

This has helped the company win major deals, such as the aforementioned national contract with a supermarket chain.

“They gave us a 12 month trial at a regional distribution centre,” says Mike. “They were happy with our service and then expanded coverage area by area until we had the whole of the UK. We have worked hard to develop a good working relationship with the local facilities managers, they trust us now and are reaping the benefits both economically and with improved reliability.”

The newest addition to the product range is the K2 high speed freezer door.

“Freezer doors tend to be very expensive, and over engineered,” explains Mike. “Our initial designs also used quite a lot of energy but now we’ve probably got the most economical door on the market in terms of both purchase price and running costs. We stripped out the complex stuff you don’t need so the door is very robust, can take an impact and can be repaired by onsite technicians.”

BID estimates the running costs of its high speed freezer door to be one third that of doors from rival manufacturers.