MILLIONS of dollars have flooded out of Orange in the last five years as large projects are awarded to contractors outside the region, but a group of engineering and manufacturing firms have come together to pursue those multi-million dollar projects.
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About $300 million in the last five years has gone to companies outside of the central west and that means lost job opportunities for Orange tradespeople.
The Orange Health Service redevelopment, the pipeline construction, and the airport redevelopment are examples of large jobs, too big for any one company to take on.
But together CDE Structures, Hort Enterprises, ILB (NSW), Orange Precision Metalcraft, Still Engineering and Trang Imagineering can provide all of the needed expertise and manpower for the job.
The six organisations together form Renweld, and spokesperson Phillip Bird said the group wants to get on the front foot to lobby major contractors to consider using central west businesses first rather than allowing money and jobs to leave the area.
“And the problem gets worse. Because the successful tenderer comes from outside the central west they don’t know much about the capability of the local companies but they are not even being asked,” Mr Bird said.
“We really want to raise the profile of manufacturing and engineering locally.”
Traditionally bigger companies have legal and business ties with certain contractors, so they are reluctant to sign on with companies they have not worked with before, Mr Bird said.
Mr Bird said he believed central west people were employed to complete less than 1 per cent of the work from the three aforementioned major projects in the area.
However the engineering consortium has already had a win.
Renweld recently won state government funding under the NSW government’s supply chain accelerator program to build its capability to win larger projects regionally and to win work beyond the central west.
The project is about broadening access to information on tenders from across the state and improving the skills of the Renweld members in bidding for work.
The project’s goals are to build on the group’s existing collaborations and to win larger, more complex work.
“Once we have got our first few wins on the board we expect to create solid momentum and attract many other businesses which service these industries so we can build the collective capacity further,” Mr Bird said.
“It has very exciting potential.”
nicole.kuter@fairfaxmedia.com.au
