Ventia has collaborated with ECLIPS, an Australian, veteran-owned business to design and build the Complete Equipment Schedule (CES) Cradle Platforms for Land 8120.
Ventia is delivering 291 engineer support vehicles to the ADF through the Land 8120 contract, leading a team of equipment manufacturers and local engineering specialists that will supply 13 different types of earthmoving and material handling vehicles including cranes, excavators, front end loaders and telehandlers. Each vehicle type requires varying levels of modifications to meet specialised Defence requirements such as air transportability and fording.
In addition to the vehicles, many of the systems also require complex transport cradles which safely and securely store, and facilitate the transport of, equipment attachments such as buckets, augers and hook blocks.
“With a priority on Australian Industry Capability, we wanted to engage a highly capable, Australian-owned company who had resources to design, develop and deliver a bespoke solution,” Richard Cave, Ventia’s Land 8120 Contract Manager said.
The initial proposal was to design the CES Cradle Platforms in Australia and manufacture overseas. During discussions ECLIPS identified the opportunity to transfer the manufacture of the CES Cradle Platforms to Australia, which significantly decreased program risk and provided AIC benefits, the companies said.
ECLIPS built a new fabrication capability in Melbourne, leveraging an existing ecosystem of local suppliers and developed advanced manufacturing systems such as robotic plasma cutting.
“The support that Ventia and the Commonwealth have provided us has been instrumental in ECLIPS being able to establish our own fabrication capability in Australia," Shaun Moore, Managing Director of ECLIPS, said. "Being able to protect our logistics innovations by keeping the detailed IP in Australia supports the growth of a globally unique logistics engineering capability and progress of genuine export opportunities.
“It has been our experience that Ventia has set a new benchmark in authentic project collaboration with SMEs. At ECLIPS we are very proud of the achievements on this project, but we recognise how important Ventia’s ‘teamwork approach’ has been to our project’s success."
Physical testing and certification of key components has been successfully completed in Tasmania for the CES Cradle base platforms (ISO 1CX and ISO1DX). The next step is move to the physical verification of the competed platform assemblies with the applicable vehicle attachments.