Internal Updates

You will have seen copies of our Newsletter across our sites this week, with all the latest news from Cubis!

If you missed it, please feel free to download a copy below:

Connect Cubis Newsletter 2019

Cubis has again been recognised for its commitment to industry best practice, as our High Carr site has now achieved the ISO 14001 certification for Environmental Management. This award was granted due to our commitment to the environment and ensures that Cubis complies with the best practices of waste management, recycling, and energy efficiency.
 
This award has not been achieved overnight, work to gain this certification began last year by the project team who did a full review of our waste streams, spill management and compliance obligations. They also carried out improvements to our existing systems. Work will be ongoing into 2020 to ensure we are continually improving our systems in line with industry best practice and promoting a strong environmental culture amongst our staff.  We would like to thank the team for their commitment and dedication to the project, your co-ordination of processes has allowed us to achieve this new milestone!

To raise awareness for World Mental Health day, we have made our morning coffee count this week, with coffee mornings at each of our seven sites across the UK and Ireland.

Our staff baked (and bought) a variety of cakes, cookies and savoury treats, we had everything from oat cakes in Stoke, to cornflake cake in Lurgan with proceeds going to our charity partner the Samaritans. Everyone enjoyed getting together and eating some not so healthy treats whilst raising money for the Samaritans.

Thank you to everyone who organised the coffee mornings and to all those who donated.

We know how important it is to maintain a healthy working lifestyle and mental health starts where we live, learn and work. It is also a good opportunity to remind you all the benefits that are available through HealthShield.

Click here for information on how to access our employee assistance programme which offers 24/7 support and up to 8 counselling sessions for free.

We are delighted to announce that we have signed a strategic supplier agreement with CityFibre, a leading UK provider of wholesale full fibre infrastructure. The contract will see Cubis supply a range of lightweight, composite access chambers and covers to CityFibre as they roll out a £2.5 billion fibre communications network to 26 ‘Gigabit Cities’ across the UK. 

Securing this scale of contract is testament to the work of our colleagues and the quality of products that are produced across Cubis.

James Thomas, Director of Supply Chain, CityFibre said: “Working with best-in-class suppliers is critical for us, and Cubis has real pedigree as a globally proven business. We look forward to a long and successful partnership and we’re particularly excited to bring Cubis on board at a time when our full-fibre rollout is gathering real momentum.”

To support this contract win and a continued rise in demand for our products, we have also announced 20 new jobs, the roles, some of which have already been filled will be across management, engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing and HR.

The most popular sporting event in the Cubis calendar took place last Friday, with the highly contested annual football tournament taking place. Teams from across our Cubis and NAL sites came together to battle it out for the 2019 title.

The event held at Goals football grounds in Liverpool welcomed seven teams of highly trained athletes from Biddulph Moor, Fenton, High Carr, Liverpool, Lurgan, Roscommon along with a team from NAL who joined us for the second year.

High Carr and Lurgan made their way to the much-anticipated final, where High Carr prevailed over the Lurgan team. The tournament was followed up with dinner at Goals where the Cubis Cup was presented to the victorious High Carr squad.

Each of the teams who participated thoroughly enjoyed the tournament, not only competing, but building new relationships with colleagues from across the sites.

Thank you to our HR team for organising the event and to everyone who took part.   

We would like to introduce you to our latest batch of graduates who joined us in 2019.

Investing in the future is important to Cubis, and these talented graduates bring with them fresh perspectives, knowledge and new ways of thinking which we should all welcome. We are looking forward to working with you all and seeing you grow and develop both professionally and personally on the programme. Best wishes on your journey with Cubis!

If you have any family or friends who are graduating in 2020, please feel free to pass on information on how they can join next year’s Graduate programme, the application period will open in March 2020.

You can find more information about what we can offer by speaking to a member of our HR team or by clicking here.

Cubis Annual Football Tournament
 
Preparations are underway across each of our sites for next week’s annual football tournament, which is being held in Liverpool on Friday 20th September.
 
Each site has been invited to put forward a team, who will battle it out on the pitch to win the coveted Cubis Cup. Having won the last two years Biddulph Moor are keen to retain their title.  With vigorous training sessions, strict diet plans and schedules its anyone guess which of these seven elite squads will win!

Please be sure to wish your team luck this week!

Good Luck to the JN Dynamos who have their first football match of the season on Sunday.

The Dynamos are an under 7 football team from Skelmersdale in Lancashire and Cubis were delighted to support the team with a full new football kit for the season.

We have a close connection to the team, as Leigh Boden our Internal Sales Co-ordinator at our Liverpool site is mother to one of the players; George.

Check out our latest video of Cubis’ Sales Representative – Ireland, Danielle Devlin, talking you through the recently supplied Cubis products to the new Translink Northern Ireland, multimodal transport hub in Derry / Londonderry.

Cubis have supplied a range of STAKKAbox™ ULTIMA Connect and Fortress network access chamber systems with AX-S™ concrete covers.

Cubis Systems Roscommon site have set a new safety performance record of ten years with no lost time due to an accident or injury. A “lost time” accident is a work-related accident or injury that results in an employee having to take time off from work.
 
The Cubis Systems Roscommon site employs 60 staff and manufactures a range of Cubis brands such as MULTIduct™, STAKKAbox™ Fortress and MONObox™ Carson, primarily for global export markets.
 
Commenting on the achievement Colman Cooney, Director of Supply Chain, Cubis Systems said “This significant milestone is down to the continued efforts of the entire Roscommon team, they have created a culture where safety is the most important aspect of our business.  We have a proactive approach to safety; the environment is one where we are continuously improving and reducing risk.  Everyone takes ownership for their actions whilst looking out for each other.  No one is afraid to point out an unsafe behaviour or situation, and that allows for quick corrective action.”
  
Colman continued “There is a lot of self-policing, and our team have a willingness to work together.  We have a works and safety committee that meet regularly and go through any concerns, observations or suggestions, they also discuss any near misses and HPLE’s, gaining learnings from those incidents. Training is also a key element, we provide a robust training program for any new team members, from day one of their employment we provide behaviour-based safety coaching. All new employees are provided with a work “buddy”, and they work closely for the first three months of their employment, to ensure they understand our rigorous safety standards”.
 
“Health and safety is at the forefront of our business as we want to make sure all our employees go home safe to their families each day. This is a huge achievement for Cubis Systems, reaching the ten-year mark proves that all employees are committed to one another’s safety. We want to keep moving forward and achieving more years.

We are now well into the Project Atlas programme, with significant progress being made to date. I am delighted to let you know that we have achieved a key milestone in the project, with the ‘Design Phase’ being approved last week.

Over the coming weeks we will enter the next ‘Realisation Phase’, and this will be really when the business starts to see the potential positive impacts of the project. As part of this we will be assigning ‘Change Agents’ to help train and support the delivery of the project.

I would encourage you to take a little time to watch the attached video as it outlines where we are with Project Atlas and our next steps.

We are delighted to announce that our brand new UK Website featuring our BIM & digital construction tools launches tomorrow at the UK's largest rail infrastructure event Railtex and we wanted you to be the first to see it.

We hope this resource will form a valuable platform for all our stakeholders and help Cubis to continue to build our global digital capability meeting the evolving needs of the digitally enabled customer.

The below video link features Cubis' Technical Manager Finn McCrory introducing BIM and providing a walk through of our new digital construction tool.

We welcome you to use this resource as a means for accessing key sector & product information, our technical resources library which hosts an array of technical and specification data and tools as well as a range of new animations and 3D product renders to help you visualise our products.

On Wednesday last week we successfully acquired Filoform BV from the company’s management team.

Filoform is a fantastic business based in the Netherlands, which manufactures cable jointing, duct sealing and building entry solutions for low and medium-voltage electricity distribution and telecommunications networks with subsidiaries in the UK and Germany.

Filoform will join us in the Network Access Products platform, accelerating growth in continental Europe and broadening the portfolio of solutions we offer to our customers. The business has an excellent track record of growth and new product development. It will continue to be led by the existing management team and will offer further growth opportunities in the years ahead.
 
You can find further information regarding Filoform by clicking here.

I am very excited to have this company with us in the NAP platform, please join me in welcoming our new colleagues.

Michael joined the then Salmor industries in 1994, in a small office in Banbridge, Co. Down, Northern Ireland.  At that time, there were less than 50 staff, a turnover of £3m and only a few products.  In his 25 years of leadership, Michael has presided over a continued expansion of Cubis, now with over 27,000 products and 726 staff across the globe. A true success story, the company has 9 sites and now exports to 25 countries around the world.

On his 25 years Michael commented “The world was a very different place back in 1994 and it has been a truly wonderful 25 years at Cubis. The time has gone by so quickly, and it’s hard to believe what we have achieved in that period.”

“More important to me than the company growth, has always been to maintain a friendly atmosphere for both staff and clients. I am delighted that so many of our staff have been here for such a long time with me on this journey.”

“Of course, I couldn’t have done this on my own. I would like thank the dedication and devotion of our staff,  who have brought the company to where it is now and I look forward to working with them as we enter the next exciting phase in our story”.

At the recent CRH Safety Awards and Lightside Conference Cubis won 2 significant awards. One for Safety Leadership in Australia and the other for Digital Marketing Excellence. Craig Quine from Cubis Australia (Operations Director) and Paul Kelly (Marketing Director) were both present to accept the awards on behalf of their teams.

Thirty-one colleagues from CRH businesses, plus three contractors, were honoured at the 2018 Europe Safety Awards ceremony which took place in Amsterdam. The event was attended by award winners and their partners from 18 countries. The awards celebrated their outstanding safety achievements over the past year. 

In total, Europe Lightside businesses took home six awards at the event, including a Safety Leadership award for Craig Quine, COO of Cubis Systems in Australia. 

Craig took responsibility for rolling out CRH’s Life Saving Rules at Cubis and “developing a strong safety culture across the multi-site business”. As a result, Craig and his team have delivered three years without lost time incidents across four of Cubis’ manufacturing sites. 

The winners received their awards from Mehmet Pekarun, MD Europe Lightside, who said: “Safety is of paramount importance to CRH. It’s vital that we recognise the outstanding contributions towards building a safe working environment that people across our business have made over the past year. I would like to congratulate all of the award winners across Europe Lightside for their great achievement and thank them for their efforts to make our platform a safer place to work”. 

Congratulating all the winners, Michael Keating, HSE Director Europe, said: “We work in a high-risk environment in our business. The leadership of people like you is vital in helping us to manage this significant risk. The example of your achievements can inspire those around you”.

The Digital Marketing Excellence award recognised the work that the Cubis team has done around it’s suite of digital marketing tools, and in particular the soon to be launched ‘Live Chat’ function on our new website. The ‘Live Chat’ function has been developed by Cubis to improve global customer engagement and can be scaled across various CRH group operating companies.

Michael Wightman, Cubis Managing Director, was delighted with the awards and said “Safety is our number one priority across all of our businesses. To be recognised for safety excellence in Australia is a great reflection on the work and collaboration that went on between our European team, led by Joe Brankin, and our Australian team, led by Craig, to implement this system. The customer experience is also hugely important to Cubis, and be recognised for marketing excellence around the digital tools that we use to engage with our customers is significant. We live in a digital age and customer expectations when communicating with suppliers is changing rapidly. It is great to see Cubis being recognised as being at the forefront of these initiatives.”

As we enter Q2 I wanted to give you an update on Project Atlas and the next important steps on developing and implementing the project.
 
The team has been more mobile around our various site as we continue the development of the overall project blueprint. This has included 3 days of sessions in High Carr and a day in Roscommon looking at the production processes. These have been very profitable times where the Aspera consultants gained a good understanding of the needs of the individual sites and how Epicor can be used to enable the efficient scheduling and processing of our production requirements as well as trying to align our different site processes within Cubis.

Q2 Stages
 
We are still on course with the projected plan, and having just finished the second iteration of the design we are about to start the end to end walk through from quotation to despatch of the goods to receipt of the payment using our own sample date.
 
This is an important step, as we want to ensure that there are no gaps in the design and to make any modifications required before a final design is agreed. We will also be reviewing any possible change requests and evaluating whether these are required and then presenting them to the steering committee for approval.
 
During April we will be looking at the data templates for uploading of our current data into Epicor and  also commencing the cleansing of our present data in preparation for the validation stage where our key users will thoroughly test the final design.
 
Again we would like to thank you all for your input and participation in the various design sessions across our sites. It is great to see such multi-site collaboration and engagement.

Cubis Systems are delighted to announce that our latest innovation in cable protection, MMtrough, has been successfully launched this week at France’s premier rail exhibition, SIFER.

Please click the video below to see Per Müller-Wille, Directeur France live from the SIFER exhibition stand introducing Cubis’ SNCF product offering and launching the new MMtrough.

Throughout this 3 day event Cubis will be showcasing our newest SNCF offering to the French rail market alongside our existing range of approved SNCF network access products. MMtrough is an innovative, lightweight, cable trough system that offers a modern alternative to traditional concrete troughing systems for the use in rail and light rail markets.

The 1 metre long units connect together allowing for 3° of vertical and horizontal flexibility within its connection, resulting in the creation of a natural bend that can follow the curvature of a track. For greater obstacles the trough body can be cut in 30° or 45° to provider a greater turning capacity. The MMtrough system has been designed to seamlessly integrate with the rest of our cable management and access chamber ranges offering the complete system solution to the market.

As part of Cubis’ focused growth plan, the Chief Executive of Midland Trading, Dubai - Mr Khalid Mahdi visited Cubis Lurgan as part of an introduction to the business, its people and its manufacturing facilities. Midland Trading, a specialist premium water products supplier has been trading for over 25 years with a central focus on providing new and innovative products to meet the dynamic needs of the water market within the U.A.E.

We are delighted to announce that we are partnering with Samaritans as our Charity of the Year for 2019. Our launch event will be Brew Monday, a Coffee Morning held next Monday, January 21st at each of the Cubis locations. Please come along to have a cuppa and a chat with your colleagues and don’t forget to bring a donation for Samaritans!

A message from The Cubis Systems Mental Health Team:

Here at Cubis Systems, we have all worked incredibly well together to develop an understanding that manufacturing can be hazardous. Working close to vehicles & forklifts, work involving isolation, handling heavy items and using machinery means that risks will always be present. Whilst we strive and continue to work towards creating the safest environment possible, one area of risk we have all overlooked is the Mental Health of each and every one of us.

Mental Health includes our emotional, psychological and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others and make choices. With the start of 2019 it is time for us all to focus not just on the physical risks associated with our business, but the mental hazards too.

Cubis Systems is committed to supporting and keeping its employees’ healthy, this is why this year we have partnered with the charity Samaritans. In today’s fast moving world it is not always easy to get professional and independent advice on things that matter, and mental health problems can affect anyone, at any time.

The Samaritans work tirelessly around the clock and are there for people when they need them. We are incredibly proud to be working with them this year and will be organising a number of events through the 2019 calendar. All with an aim to educate, develop awareness and advocacy against mental health social stigma as well as work together to raise money for a great cause.

You are all invited to our first event which will happen across all Cubis Systems sites on Monday the 21st January. ‘Blue Monday’, the third Monday in January, is known as one of the most difficult days of the year. But it doesn’t have to be. We’re asking you to join us in helping beat the January blues by getting together with each other, your colleagues, over a brew and raising vital funds for Samaritans. Make “Blue Monday”, “Brew Monday”.

As one Cubis Systems, we can all work together to show our support for better mental health and wellbeing!