Case study:
Southey Contracting
It was a smart investment decision for us to obtain Avontus Designer.
Wouter Roux, Operations Manager
The Company
Southey Contracting is a leading industrial services provider, delivering scaffolding, corrosion protection, abrasive blasting, high-pressure water jetting, and structural works across Southern Africa. With operations spanning mining, oil and gas, petrochemical, power generation, and marine environments, Southey plays a critical role in supporting complex maintenance and construction projects.
Wouter Roux, operations manager at Southey Namibia, has extensive experience in scaffolding and industrial operations. Based in Namibia, he oversees teams across multiple operational areas and contracts. With Southey’s operational branches across South Africa and other African countries, scaffolding design is a key part of the company’s drive to ensure standards compliance as part of their service offering in these regions.
The Challenge
In recent years, Southey—like many of its competitors—relied on basic, generic scaffold drawings, which worked for standard or repetitive projects. However, when they required specialized designs, they relied on external engineering services, adding significant cost and delays to obtain those designs.
In environments such as petrochemical plants, mining operations, and coal-fired power stations, projects often required massive, highly complex scaffolds to access difficult-to-reach areas like boiler internals, tanks, and plant structures. These intricate works demanded precision and careful engineering to ensure safety and compliance.
The challenge was time. Working with third-party engineers created long design, revision and approval cycles, as Wouter explained:
“That process would take weeks or months, depending on the urgency of the project and the engineer’s knowledge. In some instances, multiple changes to drawings were done before they were finalized and approved.”
This slow turnaround not only risked delaying projects but also contributed to missing out on valuable opportunities.
The Solution
In 2024, Southey implemented Avontus Designer® to bring all scaffold design in-house. Wouter and other designers now use the software to create precise 2D/3D models, generate bills of materials, and revise drawings quickly.
“It wasn’t overly complicated to work with the system. It’s user-friendly, and once you play around with it, you see what works for you. At the end of the day, with full support from senior and top management, it was a smart investment decision for us to obtain Avontus Designer,” said Wouter.
Instead of waiting weeks for an external engineer to visit a site, Southey can now capture requirements immediately and produce detailed scaffold drawings aligned to project needs. Where necessary, they still obtain final engineer sign-off, but the majority of the design work is completed internally.
The Impact
The time savings have been transformative. What once required weeks or months now takes days.
Now, stakeholders can agree on a design within a couple days and plan materials much faster. “If changes are needed, we simply revise the drawing and carry on with the works,” Wouter said.
On a recent uranium leach tank maintenance project, Southey produced a complex scaffold drawing in about a week — a process that used to take multiple weeks. By handling the design in-house, Southey avoided lengthy delays and gained full flexibility to adapt the scaffold to evolving site conditions.
These improvements let Southey expand its service offerings and win more work by bundling additional services such as blasting, corrosion protection, and structural works into a single contract.
Key Benefits Realized
- Significant Time Savings: Reduced scaffold design turnaround from months to days.
- Greater Control: Ability to produce in-house designs rather than relying on external engineers.
- Improved Accuracy: Accurate bill of materials generated automatically, enabling better project planning.
- Expanded Service Offerings: Ability to bundle scaffolding with other industrial services for clients.
- Competitive Advantage: 40% higher utilization compared to competitors.
Based on our offering only on scaffolding, I can confidently say I am about 40% higher utilization than our competitors.
Wouter Roux, Operations Manager
Final Thoughts
For Southey, Avontus Designer has become more than just a design tool—it’s a driver of efficiency and growth and a competitive edge. By cutting design timelines from weeks or months to days, the company has opened the door to new opportunities and stronger customer relationships.
As Wouter summed it up:
“Time saving and compliance to standards, by all means, are the biggest benefits. Avontus makes it easier to quantify the components required, and for us, that has been invaluable.”
