Editor’s comment for November 2021

How many busy engineering companies seriously have the time to fully evaluate their manufacturing processes these days with a view to making them more efficient and cost-effective? Just as fundamentally, how many businesses have the necessary skills in-house to carry out such an evaluation?

Picture the scenario. You’re tendering for a lucrative piece of work but after doing all the maths you realise that you’re a bit expensive and need to remove some cost from somewhere. Or, you have a job that you’ve been doing for years and suddenly your customer needs you to manufacture it cheaper because of upstream supply chain pressures.

Well, if you’re a Ceratizit UK & Ireland customer you’re sorted because, as you’ll learn from reading our cover story, the company has recently opened a new Technical Centre on the Advanced Manufacturing Park in Sheffield. And the main drivers behind the facility are the kind of scenarios I reference above.

Ceratizit has always been much more than a tooling supplier. Sure if you just need a 30mm diameter end mill and a couple of reamers off the shelf and order by 6pm, you’ll get them next day. Similarly, if you need custom tooling for a specific application, Ceratizit have got your back.

But the whole thrust of the Tech Centre is to provide additional engineering support and training for those customers who need it. This could be developing a process from scratch, working on a project, or optimising cycle times. Ceratizit’s engineers will work closely with you to find the best and most efficient solution.

The new centre is fully kitted out with machines (including 5-axis) from XYZ, Mazak and Star so there’s no shortage of technology to fully evaluate and optimise a process before it even hits the customer’s own shopfloor. It’s all about instilling confidence at the end of the day.

Ceratizit may be a highly successful €2.3 billion global company – but its mantra ‘think global, act local’ clearly illustrates why the new Tech Centre was established in the first place – to serve and support a predominantly local customer base.

The investment also underlines the strong partnerships Ceratizit UK & Ireland enjoys with fellow like-minded companies, XYZ Machine Tools, Mazak and Star GB who can also use the centre as a showroom, demo and training facility for their own customers.

Read the article here for the full lowdown.