My company is among a handful of unique ones in Western Canada, providing engineering and project management expertise in grain processing. We add value to clients’ grain businesses by facilitating capital investment decision making, optimizing existing operations, managing the design and construction of new processing assets, and providing guidance with respect to regulatory compliance.
There are not many firms like mine in Western Canada. There are big, multidisciplinary engineering firms, but if the project is not large enough, they usually won’t take on certain clients. anCeres helps fill that niche by helping small entrepreneurial owners who need support on projects like seed, grain and food processing plants.
I help smaller owners take that next step as they grow in the industry, and that’s really what I like helping them do. But that requires me to work with good partners. I have to bring in knowledgeable firms who can give my clients the equipment they need in order to get the job done. I work with many such partners, and Nexeed is one.
Nexeed is a good example of a supplier in the industry that really knows its equipment very well. They’ve done a great job of compiling all the technical information that we as engineers need to help our clients.
They’ve provided me with a big database of the capacities and the air volume that their systems require. We work together very collaboratively in understanding different processes, and we work toward a common goal — building professional, high-end installations and ensuring the resulting grain quality is superb.
Nexeed is very good at educating me about their equipment, so that I can do a good job of helping facility owners develop an overall process for themselves. Nexeed is a company that has a good core product line, but many of these projects involve components that are beyond what Nexeed supplies as well. They recognize that and are quite open to working with me and with other suppliers to put together that full package.
With Nexeed’s help I recently supported a client in the grass seed industry. Working with Nexeed was so helpful as they were able to really leverage their close relationship with Cimbria.
They brought to the table a lot of additional experience specific to that commodity. It made a huge difference for everyone involved, including the contractors and regulators.
Usually, people are good at doing what they do within their space, but that presents a risk on grain processing projects — it’s difficult to navigate the interface between one supplier and another and between one trade and another. That’s where I focus a lot of my time and effort — on the integration aspects of the project I work on in order to reduce risk for owners.
Working with a partner like Nexeed has helped me help them reduce that risk, and in today’s industry, who doesn’t like the sound of minimizing risk?
