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Unirope expands its manufacturing space in Ontario

Mississauga-based Unirope Limited has has expanded its manufacturing space.
Photo: Unirope Limited

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. — Unirope Limited has added 50,000 square feet of manufacturing space to its headquarters.

The Mississauga-based company is a specialist in the manufacturing, distribution, testing, certification and inspection of high-performance wire rope and rigging products. Along with its Mississauga headquarters, the company has additional facilities in Quebec and Alberta. The three sites combine to deliver service across Canada, and to select customers in the United States and Europe.

Unirope states the expansion represents completion of a journey that started in 2018, a ground-breaking two years later and a major construction project that concluded in 2021. Since then, further investment has been committed to equipping the facility with a suite of state-of-the-art machining and fabrication equipment, centered on wire rope fabrication, synthetic sling manufacturing and computer numerical control (CNC) technology.

 “At a minimum we have cut lead times in half, and in the best case we have seen a 400 per cent improvement,” stated Justin Brown, president at Unirope. “We are moving towards modernizing the traditional rigging shop model. The words ‘rigging shop’ and ‘modern’ are rarely mentioned in the same breath. Many of the products are heavy and lined with grease, and most factories are stuck in the 1980s with equipment from the 1960s. Not us.

“We have implemented material handling solutions to help with heavy lifting; installed modern machinery to make reeling, cutting, and fabrication easier; utilized technology to put work instructions at the fingertips of production workers; installed a full machine shop with modern [CNC] capabilities for custom wire rope end fittings; upgraded ventilation to keep the air clean; and fitted environmentally-friendly plant lighting alongside fit-for-purpose test units.”

Mississauga-based Unirope Limited has added 50,000 square feet of manufacturing space to its headquarters.
Photo: Unirope Limited

The majority of Unirope’s work is on customized rigging products. For example, 90 per cent of all chain slings it manufactured in 2023 were unique, either in size, length, or configuration. The business can proof test up to 1.3 million pounds and the highest single vertical sling capacity in the portfolio is 600,000 pounds.

Unirope, which has been servicing the industry since 1956, already had two warehouses in Mississauga, but was running out of space to store its growing inventory. The situation was starting to impede production, the company states, and it would have been impossible to navigate a phase of growth without expanding and streamlining operations.

 “With strategic machinery updates, we were able to eliminate certain labour-intensive tasks, and ease the burden on production employees,” Brown said. “The work is difficult, so anything we could do to make the jobs more efficient eased the physical impact on our employees. Remember, unemployment is at an all-time low, so we have to optimize our workforce. The overall investment led to efficiencies that allowed us to eliminate bottlenecks, deliver faster and increase our outputs.”

An automatic wire rope cutting line, plus additional swagers and upgraded annealing machines, will be operated with an additional test bed and a third Twin-Path machine. Additional warehouse space also meant that inventory could also be increased across all product lines, including Python high-performance wire rope, Grade 100 chain, and range of Crosby rigging hardware. Python wire rope is stocked in a wide variety of constructions for tower cranes, mobile and truck cranes, overhead cranes, and gantry cranes. These ropes are widely used in construction, automotive and industrial applications. Unirope also stocks a variety of other standard and custom ropes, all meeting national and international standards.