ACT engineering company ECLIPS has shaken off its former Sea Box International name, thanks to an October rebrand that focused on a decade of providing Australian-designed purpose-built deployable habitats based on shipping containers.
As Sea Box International, ECLIPS has provided logistics platforms and shipping container-based modular buildings tailored for a variety of roles from emergency accommodation to training facilities and cyclone shelters since 2007. Tailored ECLIPS containers are dotted around the country, including 150 making up Army’s Townsville urban operations training village facility and others configured as containerised diesel generator modules for Navy, 20-person cyclone shelters for Western Australian mining companies and a deployable self-contained laboratory for Defence Science and Technology Group that expands to three times its normal width on site.
The company has also created deployable logistics storage and warehousing equipment, including flat-racks, and the CROWS (Container Roll-Out Warehousing System), an inter-connectable steel cargo-carrying platform and field warehousing system that can be rolled in and out of standard ISO shipping containers for transport. ECLIPS recently completed delivery of 2,157 logistics flat-racks for Army under Land 121 Phase 3B.
ECLIPS managing director Shaun Moore said that with the company’s recent 10th anniversary, it was time to differentiate its specialised, Australian designed products from the US company Sea Box Incorporated, a company with which it originally partnered.
ECLIPS has followed a development path familiar to many, including initial defence success, moves in to civil markets as defence budgets ebbed and flowed and transfer of knowledge gained in the civil world to success in later defence contracts.
As a former soldier in the 1st Battalion RAR, Moore’s first civilian job was with a management company contracted to build the ADF’s new urban training facility at Shoalwater Bay in Queensland.
“My job was to build an urban training facility in which we could test the integration of live training, virtual simulation and constructive simulation,” he said to ADM. “I travelled around the world and had a look at different facilities, and I ended up designing it myself. I thought there’s probably a market here to start my own company, with known and trusted partners, building urban training facilities. So that’s really where the company launched.”
Two business partners completed the original triumvirate, which expanded again when a meeting with a visiting Sea Box Incorporated executive at Queensland’s Indy Grand Prix in 2006 brought an American connection and the Sea Box name and marketing reach. And initial efforts paid off, with Moore asked to design and build another urban training facility that would be used by his old army unit.
“We got the job to build another really big urban training facility in Townsville. Being an ex-1RAR soldier it was wonderful to go back to my old stomping ground.”
Even today Moore is still grateful for the defence force acquisition system that gave a small newcomer a break.
Civil opportunities
But a later change of government put paid to defence expansion. ECLIPS moved in to modular construction on civil projects, building South Australia’s Cadell Prison, portable cyclone shelters and even an 850-person kitchen for a mining client in Port Hedland. A contract followed for modified containers to fulfil stringent environmental standards for the Gorgon natural gas project on the pristine Barrow Island off Western Australia’s north west coast. And one thing led to another.
“The real turning point came on the Gorgon project when an ex-Army logistician rang us up and said look, we believe you can do military logistics platforms. We’re haemorrhaging logistics costs and really having problems getting equipment in work packs on to Barrow Island.
“So we then self-funded an R&D project and we developed the Containerised Rollout Warehousing System (CROWS). That’s a platform that rolls in and out of a container and also forms an expedient field warehousing system. From first phone call to building prototypes and conducting separate testing activities both in China and in location in Australia and a subsequently building 4,000 units, was 11 months.
“At the time when we first started the project they had three enormous supply bases operating around the Fremantle area. We delivered 1,000 CROWS and they closed one of the supply bases down. By the time we delivered the last CROWS platform they only had one operating base. We were told that by the time we’d delivered the 4,000 units that they’d paid for themselves.”
This time the ebbs and flows worked in the company’s favour, with a contract for more than 2,000 ISO1C Flatracks for Project Land 121 Phase B3 virtually picking up where the CROWS contract left off.
Moore believes there is plenty of scope for innovation in smart logistics, despite it being an art as old as time. The original CROWS design is being modified to mount solar panels, which will create a container-deployable solar farm, active within hours of landing on site. This project, the Container Roll Out Solar System (CROSS) is now an ARENA supported R&D Project due for completion mid 2018. A request to design a platform to carry massive steel pipe spawned the Pipe Intermodal Logistics System (PILS), a system now being exported that simply clamps the pipes together as a unit so they can be moved around like a modular shipping container.
Another challenge was the issue of Western Australian mining companies having to shut down sites in the north west at the approach of a cyclone. ECLIPS designed self-contained cyclone proof shelters with integral concrete floors that gave strength and cyclone-standard integrity (marketed with a snappy slogan asking mining companies if they were suffering from “premature evacuation”).
People power
Like many, Moore lays the success of ECLIPS at the feet of its people.
“Our mandate is to mix the employment of veterans and innovative young Australian engineers. As such we bring together a Defence culture of disciplined planning and owning the mission, as well as investing in our inventive youth and creative thinking.
“I think one of the standouts is we’ve been engaged in a few engineering internship programs, including the Defence Engineering Internship Program. But also we’re actively involved with the Faculty of Engineering at Australian National University. So all of our engineers are all people that we’ve actually put through an internship program of some description or met through a project for the university. So it’s very much a try before you buy.”
He believes programs that help ease defence veterans in to civil roles would benefit both parties.
“I would love to see a similar internship program for veterans, to give them an opportunity to get some runs on the board and prove their significant worth in the commercial world.”
This article first appeared in the December/January edition of ADM.