Hydraulic cylinder manufacturer, Burnside Eurocyl, continues to power success with its award-winning strategy 

Trusted by OEMs across Europe and North America, Burnside Eurocyl is a leading hydraulic cylinder manufacturer widely recognized for providing exceptional value, expertise and top-quality service. As a part of the Burnside Group, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, Burnside Eurocyl offers over 50 years of production prowess, supplying some of the world’s biggest names, including JCB, John Deere, Kubota and Volvo. The business employs a talented team of over 250 people across its 12,500-square-meter facility, offering a comprehensive catalogue of state-of-the-art cylinders, ranging from single and double acting cylinders right through to displacement, telescopic, sensor positioning cylinders and beyond. 

Manufacturing Today last spoke with Robert Byrne, Director at Burnside Eurocyl, back in May 2024 when he spoke about the company’s global market development strategy and investments into automation. One year on, Robert returns to discuss how these initiatives have progressed over the past 12 months and how they’ve positioned the company for a continuing prosperous future.

“Over the last year, Burnside Eurocyl has adapted its business strategy to remain aligned with the evolving market conditions. We’ve introduced some strategic adjustments, including a much stronger focus on customer engagement and developing our sales pipeline,” Robert begins. “We’ve also conducted a comprehensive internal review of our company, which included market trend analysis, customer feedback and performance benchmarking against our key competitors, and we introduced a weekly cross-functional team to identify areas for improvement. Based on these insights, we refined our approach, specifically focusing on opportunities to lower our costs to remain competitive and to simplify the management of the business. 

“Our biggest barriers to growth over the next period will be the current economic uncertainty and shortage of skilled talent, both of which make it difficult to scale operations. Last year, we discussed investments in automation and robotics, and over the past year, we’ve accelerated this significantly to help us become much more efficient.” 

As a dynamic company centered around innovation, Burnside Eurocyl is no stranger to cutting-edge technology. By adapting and evolving with ever-changing industry advancements and market demands, the company is consistently praised for its flexibility in providing only the very best for its customers. As the business looks to upscale its operations, it continues to draw on its wealth of experience and expertise to implement the best technologies and automation to enhance its manufacturing processes and overall efficiency. 

“We’ve invested in some additional pick-and-place robots with a greater payload capacity – robots that can lift and rotate weights of up to 150 kilograms and lengths of up to three meters. By using our knowledge on smaller technologies, we’ve been able to scale the introduction of further automation throughout the company,” Robert explains. 

This commitment to excellence is what separates Burnside Eurocyl from its competitors, earning the company a robust workforce, loyal customer base and a series of impressive accolades. For the fifth year running, Burnside Eurocyl has been awarded a coveted position on Deloitte’s list of Ireland’s Best Managed Companies. The list represents the very best in Irish business and it is an incredible achievement for the company to win not just once, but five times. 

“This recognition shows us that what we’re doing – across all levels of management – is working. We’re very proud of it; we believe that it’s been a very good team building exercise within our company and has been great for networking and benchmarking our company against other businesses,” Robert affirms. “The reason we’ve been able to win that title for five years in a row is because we have a clear focus on achieving our KPIs; even though the market is very up and down at the moment, we’ve managed to stay profitable and continue to improve on our KPIs.” 

Looking to the future, Burnside Eurocyl is keen to further modernize and streamline its processes to remain competitive in the current market. In our previous interview with Robert in 2024, he detailed the company’s strategy to grow the market by targeting companies for potential business, and, recently, the business attended bauma, the world’s leading trade fair for construction, building materials, mining machines, construction vehicles and construction equipment, to do just that. 

“As a company, we’re trying to automate as many of our production processes as possible. In our early days, we focused predominantly on welding and machining, but our next focus will be on assembly and how we can remove some of the complexity of the business to become nimbler as a company. The only way for us to compete now is to provide a very good service that’s not just centered around cost, but also quality, reliability and value,” Robert says. “By attending bauma, we’ve managed to strengthen our sales pipeline, and we received several requests for quotation from potential new business. We also engaged in meetings with our existing customers to discuss new projects, and we managed to locate some potential new suppliers, which will help bolster our supply chain as the company continues to grow.” 

It’s clear that Burnside Eurocyl is well positioned for a profitable future. As it continues to push the boundaries of hydraulic innovation, the company intends to remain focused on its existing strategy as it embarks on its growth trajectory, investing further into new automation and practices to supply superior, affordable products and services to its customers. Whatever challenges the market throws, however, one thing about Burnside Eurocyl will always remain unchanged: the business’ dedication to high quality service, reliability and value.  

https://burnside-eurocyl.com