Withdrawing completely from the Australian market was Taywood Engineering, subsidiary of the UK-based major engineering firm, Taylor Woodrow. In September 2001, the ever-expanding Worley Group picked up the ball and announced the development of a new client service team dedicated to Corrosion & Integrity Management, principally drawn from the ashes of the Taywood team.

Initially it comprised staff from the Perth-based Corrosion Group, including Peter Bartlett (manager), Chris Selman, Mark Davidson and Gary Evans, but has subsequently been joined by Dean Parker from CorrPro. Bartlett said further recruitment was in progress as he foresaw increased demands both from within Worley and from external clients.

He said that demand would cover all forms of Corrosion Management and Risk Based Integrity Management (RBIM) and work across the full spectrum of industries, including pipelines, oil & gas, petrochemical, process & refining, mining, infrastructure and construction.

Bartlett said the move to Worley provided great opportunities for the team to implement their skills and expand their horizons. "The potential for synergy with the Worley Safety & Risk Management group and Transfield Worley Solutions (TWS) is tremendous and gives Worley all-encompassing capabilities in Asset Management. The combination of Worley's custom-designed RBIM software, Præsidio, with other in-house and proprietary software for explosion, fire, toxic release, environmental, economic and reliability modelling provides very powerful tools to provide state-of the art, efficient services to our clients," he said.

Ionik Consulting is a completely new entity, although as a subsidiary of the global Wood Group, they have a well-established lineage. Currently based in the same offices as the Perth branch of the Wood Group and sister company, JP Kenny, Ionik have built up a staff of around 20 engineering consultants since they opened offices in Perth and Melbourne. They will also have five new graduate engineers joining the firm this year .

Business manager, Mark Linton, said one of their major strengths as a consulting group was that they weren't selling any product lines or had to push particular brands.

"We don't sell widgets," said Mark. "We don't own assets as such, we sell competent technical people only. Most of our competitors are usually selling something, a product or a technology. We are totally independent of sales. I think one has to fairly wary of consultants who are required to sell products".

"We also don't intend to buy or build testing facilities. It makes better business sense to rent the services and facilities of - for example the UWA or Curtin University - where you put something back into the local educational community than to invest in a facility of our own," he said.

The formation of Ionik seems to follow a well-established game plan of the Wood Group. This seems to include the independence from product sales, but also the generation and retention of a specialty brand. JP Kenny is a leading brand in the niche world of subsea and pipeline engineering. Another Wood Group subsidiary is Frontier Engineering, a front-end engineering and process design house, created and branded to fill a niche in that portion of the market.