History

Complete Fire Design (CFD) was established in 2003 by Richard Welsh. Richard had studied for a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and, subsequently, a Master’s Degree in Fire Engineering before working as a Fire Safety Engineer for various Multidisciplinary Engineering Firms. Richard saw an opportunity to innovate and provide high level specialist fire engineering services that were not being offered by other firms in the industry.

Initially, CFD was established to provide fire safety engineering services to the Commercial and Infrastructure sectors in Western Australia. During its first five years of operation, CFD built a strong and loyal client base and revenues in this sector. Significantly, CFD became the first Western Australian firm to embrace fully the concept of ‘fire & life safety engineering’ that integrated fire engineering, fire services design and regulatory compliance to provide safer, more flexible and economical building and industrial design.

In response to the GFC (2008), CFD seized the opportunity to diversify its operations into the Mining & Industrial and Oil & Gas sectors by recruiting highly qualified fire engineers who had been made redundant during the worst of the financial crisis. This shift in strategic direction enabled CFD to move progressively into the fire protection and industrial markets; and secure work with some of Western Australia’s (and the World’s) largest companies. This calculated but, ultimately, highly successful risk enabled the Company to grow and establish strategic alliances with a range of major players in the industrial and oil & gas sectors.

The expansion into the Mining & Industrial and Oil & Gas Sectors required the company to develop and refine its systems and processes including obtaining ISO 9001 accreditation in 2013 and introducing project controls and delivery methodologies. In 2015 CFD further developed its service offering in Oil & Gas by developing skills in Technical Safety and Risk and the development of Fire & Gas mapping and Consequence Analysis technologies. This technology has been successfully applied to Oil & Gas projects in the Middle East and Asia.

With the appointment of a highly experienced Engineering Manager in 2015, CFD’s fire protection and loss prevention engineering skills were also further enhanced. In the same year, CFD further developed its Structural Fire Engineering skills utilising Finite Element Modelling in conjunction with Computational Fluid Dynamics to assess structural performance with thermal loading which has been successfully applied to infrastructure projects in Australia.

Today Complete Fire Design continues to innovate and provide its clients a wider range of service offerings and technologies in its three core market sectors. From project concepts to detailed fabrication design, project costing and procurement services, construction monitoring and commission, maintenance and upgrade works, CFD will continue to successfully complete fire engineering projects across Australia and around the world.