WINDOWS | MEMBER PROFILE
A TIRELESS INNOVATOR-
ROD BEEL
Rod Beel, R & D Systems Manager, Aluminium Industries, has been a major force for change in the window industry for many years. He discusses what he’ s learned from over four decades’ experience at the forefront of innovation.
Rod entered the window industry in November, 1971, as a sales cadet at Trimview Windows, Springvale. Trimview Windows was acquired by Alcan in 1982, and Rod transferred the following year to Alcan Building Products to promote the company’ s residential product range to fabricators.
After becoming Sales Manager in 1986, Rod began dabbling in the design of the Alcan 580 residential product range.“ It sounds ridiculous now, but my wife at the time had started a uni degree and as she studied, I stayed up at night doing my work,” Rod says of the nights he spent at the drafting board.
While still Sales Manager at the company, Rod played a fundamental role in developing the DOS-based Alexsys database – a highly influential estimating program that was Soft Tech’ s forerunner to V6 today.
Database development and support in the era of Alexsys was a very different affair to today.“ We had around 70 customers on the Alexsys database, during the days when most companies didn’ t even have dialup internet,” Rod remembers.“ Due to the lack of a remote connection, I spent a significant amount of time training with my eyes closed trying to visualise what customers were doing on the other end of the phone.”
During the 1990s, the company underwent significant change.“ In 1995, Alcan changed its name to Capral, and in 1996 we acquired Comalco,” Rod explains.“ The Comalco acquisition brought Paul Condon onto the scene as National Marketing Manager... and we had a wild and exciting ride for the next six years.”
It was an extremely productive time.“ Paul had originally worked for Comalco in Western Australia, then moved to Sydney,” Rod says.“ He brought Tracey Gramlick, now Executive Director and CEO of the Australian Window Association, to work with him [ as Technical Manager ] while I remained in Melbourne as Product Manager doing the principal design work on our product range.”
“ The takeover spawned a comprehensive program of rationalisation to fold two similar, but different, ranges into one catalogue, a process which involved extensive redesigning, retesting and redrawing,” Rod explains.“ In that time, Tracey, Paul and I rationalised and redeveloped the Comalco range and integrated it within the Capral range.”
The V6 program also got underway at around that time.“ On top of everything else that was happening in 1996, we secured the rights for the program’ s sole development in Australia,” Rod remembers.
The V6 database was a mammoth task.“ Nobody knew how much time it would take to develop,” he says.“ Database development within my role was slow and eventually Paul told me to‘ go home until you finish it’, and that took an entire year.”
Through 1998 to 1989, Rod focused completely on developing the database – an experience that fully utilised his rapidly developing computer skills.“ My programming knowledge is completely home-grown,” he says.“ I learned everything myself, based on my need to know at the time. Creating the database involved a lot of‘ hackwork’, as I like to call it. I’ m particularly proud of my role in developing and releasing Soft Tech’ s V6 software package.”
The first V6 program was initially released to Capral and a United States based company, Efco, who had helped fund the initial development. Efco were developing a database for their internal needs, while Capral developed it to meet the requirements of their Australian customer base.“ In 1999, our company saw the world’ s first commercial release of the V6 database; and by 2003, we had 160 customers,” Rod remembers.
Rod stayed with Capral until being approached by Architectural Window Systems( AWS) in 2003, remaining there for five years in technical support and V6 database development.
For a further three years, Rod worked as an Estimator and Project Manager for one of AWS’ s customers, Regency Windows.“ This role was the culmination of my 40-year apprenticeship in the window industry,” Rod reflects.
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16 Winter 2017