Bidass Industrial Services Association (Bidass), a no-profit, no-loss company, will commence procurement of steel of various specifications and sizes for industrial consumption and distribute them among member shareholders, a top company official said.
Bidass President S Sampath said engineering industries have to undergo a lot of trouble in purchasing steel, their basic raw material, due to perennial price fluctuation throughout the year and constraints in quality selection.
Bidass deals in bulk purchase of industrial consumables like welding electrodes, coils, fluxes, grinding and painting materials and distributes them to shareholding members at cost price and also supplies oxygen cylinders to the members.
Bidass has approached some leading iron and steel makers in the public and private sector to handle steel material and is setting up a yard and storage facility at nearby Thuvakudi for member consumers that find it difficult to keep up delivery schedules and price terms due to irregular supplies of steel material in terms of both time and cost factors.
He claimed the Bidass model has been very successful in India and all 375 members, comprising small and medium enterprises, across states could procure consumables and other items on time, with stringent quality and price control.
He said it was only Bidass that controls market prices of welding consumables and paints made and supplied by leading manufacturers. There are no middlemen and Bidass incurs minimal overhead expenditure before supplies are made.
In a first-of-its-kind in Asia, Bidass had installed two units at its campus at Thuvakudi to manufacture oxygen by extraction from atmospheric air through air compression. The installed capacity is 200 cubic metres of oxygen per day, supported by three other depots at Mathur, Thiruverambur and Ariyamangalam.
To meet future oxygen cylinder demand, Bidass was also setting up a two lakh cubic metres a month capacity plant at an incremental investment of Rs 40 lakh.
Plans are on to install a common testing and calibration centre with at an outlay of Rs 2.5 crore. This centre will reduce the burden of SMEs in procuring statutory certification for raw materials, their production line and finished goods, for which members have to depend on private testing labs and others located beyond factory locations at present.
Bidass will soon introduce an online ordering system for the benefit of member industries, for which an ERP module is already in place.
Sampath said Bidass has been maintaining consistent growth. From just a Rs 6 lakh turnover in 1984, its revenues touched Rs 36.75 crore in 2009-10 and Rs 40 crore in the year ended March 31, 2011. With the trend of maintaining a growth rate of 8-10% year-on-year, he hoped to clock a Rs 50 crore-plus turnover in the current year.
