70 business elite canada
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SEPT/OCT 2014
Ontario-based company. “We were responsi-
ble for everything above the concrete founda-
tion and above the concrete slab.”
Burnco Manufacturing was founded in 1994
with a focus on equipment automation for
the manufacturing sector. The business grew
quickly and by the end of the decade, Burnco
was outfitting up to one million square feet of
manufacturing space annually with the ma-
chines that would fabricate products like desk
drawers, filing cabinets and other light steel
structures sold by their clients, O’Neill said.
But in the early 2000s, the construction of
new manufacturing facilities started to slow
down and Burnco began looking for ways to
expand their work in the construction sector,
using their in-house knowledge to find ways to
apply automated and semi-automated fabri-
cation procedures to the structural steel busi-
ness.
One of the initial products they worked on
was the open web steel joist, a building staple
“We’re looking forward to going around the world with this design and
bringing it to any other country that’s building large buildings.”
