By Nick Stewart
Patented cost-saving technologies and highly
specialized contract capacity may be what distinguishes DST Engineering
Consultants Ltd. from its competition, but it's the company's
Northern Ontario experience that has driven its enthusiasm and
growth.
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Michael Fabius, President
and CEO
DST Consulting Engineers Inc. |
"We have very difficult conditions
here," says Michael Fabius, President and CEO. "Whether
it's hard rock or muskeg or extreme ranges of temperature or logistics,
conditions are a lot tougher than if you were doing the same work
in, say, Toronto. So that's why we felt that we have to be pretty
good if we could manage what we were doing here, and that we should
be able to apply that anywhere in the world."
Armed with the motto, "If you can do
it in Northern Ontario, you can do it anywhere," DST Engineering
has seen an annual rate of 20 per cent growth over the last decade,
and has a current annual revenue of $10 million.
The company employs more than 100, incorporating a full range
of engineers, scientists and contractors across its offices in
Beirut, Lebanon – "Since the Middle East peace process
went off the rails, there's just no investment happening there,"
says Fabius – as well as Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Ottawa and
Kenora. By 2010, DST is expected to have offices all throughout
Canada, from Western Canada to the Maritimes.
The company started out as a branch office
of a Thunder Bay engineering firm in 1971, and after purchasing
it in 1993, Fabius renamed it and refocused its efforts to expanding
and exporting its knowledge and abilities to the world at large.
While this has led DST Engineering to become
fully capable of handling many industrial tasks such as mine rehabilitation,
geotechnology and foundation engineering, it’s the patented
slope stabilization technology that has brought it particular
attention.
Called Soil Nail and Root Technology (SNART),
the process of combining engineering know-how with a specific
plant cover was developed in 2000 after CN Rail asked for a cheaper,
easier and more efficient way of stabilizing slope embankments.
This led to the development of a method
that removed drilling and grouting from the equation of slope
stabilization, with the soil nails instead being driven or vibrated
into the earth and plates welded to the top of each. The shotcrete
was replaced with vegetation, whose rootset would accomplish the
same task more efficiently and with tremendous savings; Fabius
estimates that it more than halves the cost.
This development has led to the publication
of numerous technical papers, patenting in Canada and the U.S.,
lecture invitations from the American Society of Civil Engineers,
as well as projects including a $1 million contract with the Lakehead
Region Conservation Authority in Thunder Bay.
Currently working with Manitoba Highways
to implement their SNART technology, DST Engineering has licensed
their discovery to numerous American design-build contractors
within the past year, in locations that include Minnesota, Washington
and California.
This technology is so specialized that no
competition currently exists for it, enabling the company to promote
it on a global basis from its offices in Northern Ontario.
Slope stabilization isn't the only realm in which it has strong
niche interests; DST Engineering's capacity for demolishing buildings
has led it into highly specialized work in 2005, such as the demolition
of Canada's second-largest smokestack in Quebec and the destruction
of large structures in downtown Winnipeg.
Fabius is as proud of the role his employees
play within the company as he is of his patented technology and
specialized abilities, pointing to the company's flat organizational
structure. Despite its size, the company features a minimum of
bureaucracy and middle managers which in turn empowers the employees.
"We give our people a lot of
rope and responsibility," he says. "We have project
managers that are right out of school and some project managers
that have been with us for years. They get good tools to work
with, but they also get total responsibility and they do not have
anybody looking over their shoulder all the time. It makes things
kind of crazy and hectic sometimes, but somehow it seems to work."
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