Pyroban was started over 50 years ago, founded by Phil Tyrer after he saw the consequences of a tragic accident where a standard forklift truck ingested flammable gas and caused an explosion.
Tyrer was one of the engineers assigned to the health and safety investigation into the incident. He then bought the rights to the project that came out of the investigation and established “Pyroban”, a family-owned company built to develop and market the specialised safety valve they had developed. It was the start of a long journey.
“50 years on, we are the leader in the industry for taking standard industrial equipment and modifying it for use in a hazardous environment where there is a risk of explosion,” says Steve Noakes, Pyroban’s Managing Director today. “It is a niche business because many pieces of equipment are not designed to operate in these areas. We are working with OEMs, but also supporting end users to make sure their facilities operate safely.”
As it has grown, Pyroban has developed a reputation for professional integrity that is respected across the market. Modifying customer equipment is not always easy, but taking shortcuts is not an option for Pyroban; offering customers clarity on the business processes, and how it justifies the work it does.
“It underpins our values as a business,” Noakes says. “We are trusted partners in those situations, and that is manifested in our customers’ loyalty.”
A Collaborative Relationship
Today the company is a development partner, helping clients produce and safely store products in a way that protects people, their investment, and our environment. It means that Pyroban has an obligation to make sure its pace of development matches those of its OEM customers.
“Our customers are continually evolving their technology to bring it in line with new regulations and improvements,” Noakes says. “It means that all day, every day, we are reverse engineering pieces of equipment, identifying how they operate and assessing how that is relevant to its application to then make suitable modifications for safe use.”
Pyroban’s entire brand is built on workplace safety, which became a major issue during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in the manufacturing sector.
“We were requested to keep our business running to continue to supply the manufacturing and logistics sectors, so we had to adapt the way we operated in a Covid environment,” Noakes says. “Given our very people-orientated, project-based, shopfloor-centric way of working, we were well-positioned to ensure collaboration took place in a safe environment.”
Noakes describes this as a game changer for the industry, with Pyroban innovating new ways for teams to work together.
“On a Sunday we would get the latest news from the Government about the Covid requirements that would be in place on Monday,” Noakes recalls. “It really enforced collaboration across the company.”
A More People-Orientated Time
While those constantly shifting requirements may now be a thing of the past, the industry is still navigating Covid, its effects on the global supply chain, and new demands for flexibility among the customers and workforce.
“That is one of the big changes we have made as a business on the back of our Covid experience,” Noakes tells us. “We have become even more people-orientated, launching new wellbeing initiatives within the organisation.”
Pyroban has achieved foundation-level member of Thrive at Work, a similar scheme to Investors in People that Noakes has found provides a good model for supporting his teams and is working towards bronze accreditation this year.
“Attracting new talent into the business is important. We have an engineer who supports outreach-to-schools through STEM initiatives, to engender a young interest in the engineering activity we do,” Noakes says. “We are planning our fourth cohort of apprenticeships, giving them the chance to work alongside our technicians and office staff to impart their knowledge across the generations.”
The firm has been successful in keeping on many of its apprentices, and some of them are now training the next generation of apprentices. Pyroban also supports a number of undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.
“Internally, we have put a lot of time and effort into our appraisal system to understand where people are in their career,” Noakes says. “As a result of that, 18% of our team members across the engineering, shop floor and office base undertook personal development, third-party training last year in addition to the mandatory internal training.”
It is a level of investment that Noakes has personally benefited from. He joined the company 31 years ago as a mechanical engineer, rising through the company to become its General Manager three years ago. At the same time, Pyroban itself has benefited from Noakes’s insights and ideas, leading to a bold new era for the company.
Pioneers in Safety
“I saw that we had a lot of latent skill within the business,” Noakes recalls. “We are good at carrying out conversions on equipment, and I realised we could use that skill to give more of an offering to our end users, helping to maintain their equipment and keep their work environment safe.”
This was the birth of the Pioneer Safety Group, a company that harnessed Pyroban’s knowledge on a consultative basis.
“We created a business model that looks at all the things an end-user requires, supplementing our resources with third-party associates and our longstanding reputation with customers,” Noakes says.
The business model has evolved since then, with the relationships developed with those third-party businesses evolving to the point where it has acquired some of them to build a portfolio of leading brands, the Pioneer Safety Group.
Within this growing Group, Pyroban is still one of its core elements together with Pyropress in Plympton, but now it is joined by brands such as Ex-tech Solution and Ex-tech Signalling.
“We are building the group to support end-users in their journey for safety and compliance,” Noakes tells us. “We have plans to continue to grow the group organically, through market expansion and targeted acquisitions to deliver more customer solutions from within the group, which, in turn, will also provide exciting career opportunities for our teams.”
At the same time as growing the consultation arm of the business, Pyroban is also looking at additional solutions it can offer to improve safety.
“We are seeing significant shifts in technology across all our sectors of the group. Our traditional Materials Handling business is moving into the automation sector,” Noakes says. “We have great relationships with AGV manufacturers working on fully autonomous vehicles which will be the next generation of solutions. Meanwhile, in the oil and gas sector, we are moving towards electrification, hydrogen, and renewables.”
