Now in its fifth year, Inspiration through Innovation has become one of the UK’s premier annual advanced manufacturing best-practice events and is a firm favourite with technical partners and UK and Irish component manufacturers alike.
Although keeping with the key underlying principles of collaboration, knowledge-sharing and partnership which has made it so successful in previous years, the 2018 event did have a different format and structure.
The main differences were an increase in machining demonstrations, the addition of a best-practice tutorial programme that ran alongside a seminar programme, and the creation of a new technical partner exhibitor zone.
Seco UK’s managing director, Richard Jelfs explains: “When you have an established and popular event there is a natural inclination to not want to change or tinker with its structure or content. However, from feedback gained from last year combined with our own commitment to continuous improvement, we decided to change the focus and put machining right at the heart of the event.”
There were 16 machining demonstrations with each focusing on an actual or representative customer part and involving a number of technical partners working together to develop the machining process. The technical partners included machine tool builders, CAD/CAM providers, workholding specialists, cutting fluid experts and metrology equipment companies. Seco provided the cutting tools for all 16 demonstrations.
Mike Fleming, strategic marketing, products and services manager at Seco Tools UK comments: “In addition to the machine tools we already have at our Technology Centre a number of machine tool builders – Grob, Mills CNC/Doosan, Heller, Matsuura, Mazak, Romi, Willemin-Macodel, Fanuc and CNC Robotics – also brought machines.
“All were involved in demanding and challenging demonstrations. Specific parts machined at the event included high-precision and complex aerospace, automotive, medical components. Overall, we were delighted by visitor turnout and by the commitment and response shown by all our Technical Partners.
Richard Jelfs concludes: “Our objective with Inspiration through Innovation has always been to create an inspiring and practical event that is truly customer-focused and that demonstrates to visitors and partners alike that significant improvements in productivity, quality and performance can be best achieved through collaboration and by sharing best practice.”
Seco Tools (UK) www.secotools.com
