New team shapes the future

rward thinking, dynamic management team has been in place since 2016, providing a platform for continued growth, prosperity and ongoing investment. PES reports.

Handing over the reins of a company is never an easy thing to do – even harder when the best part of your working life has been leading the way, building the family business, investing in people and technology, creating the brand and everything it stands for: innovation, commitment to value, quality and customer service.

Fortunately for Paul and the Darwent family, who still own a controlling interest in Mini Gears, they now had the right people at the top of the company who had been with them for many years and so in 2016, in its 50^th year, managing director, Peter Durkin, sales director, Nigel Walker and Rob MacNeill, now finance director, bought into the business. This senior management team was further strengthened by David Jobe who joined Mini Gears in 2015 and became production director in 2016.

“There comes a time when you have to look at what is best for the interest of the company,” affirms Paul Darwent, chairman of Mini Gears, stepping down from his day to day involvement in the business after 30 years. “I have worked very hard over the last few years assembling a team that I totally trust and it is now time for our new ‘invigorated team’ to reshape the company for the next 50 years ahead.”

Now in 2019, after a smooth transition, the company is doing well and the new management team continue to invest in capacity, people and training as Mini Gears has always done to meet the demands of today’s competitive markets and keeping at the forefront of its industry.

Topping up the turnover

Mini Gears (Stockport) is a specialist subcontract engineering company, manufacturing precision machined parts, gears and racks for a wide range of industries on a global basis. There are over 100 machines at its 35,000ft² factory in Stockport and now with 90 employees, it has a skill set that can be transferred across industries, which is a huge benefit when a key market becomes subdued as Peter Durkin explains.

“The recent downturn in the oil and gas industry and its supply chain companies where we had a number of customers, had caused a dramatic drop in our turnover,” he says.

“We had to find new business and therefore concentrated our efforts on the aerospace market, where we had been working with aircraft seating companies for a number of years. With our expertise in cutting gears and racks we achieved major successes improving the seating mechanisms of 1st class business seats and pilot seats, which in turn led to us manufacturing many types of machined components associated with the seats such as privacy screen profiles, table arms, hinges, brackets and seat supports.

“Our innovative approach and commercial knowledge enabled us to offer substantial cost savings to our customers and to continue to grow in this market,” he adds. “The entire workforce put in a tremendous effort to achieve AS 9100 Rev C in 2016 and last year we gained AS 9100 Rev D approval.

“From turnover dropping to £7.7 million in 2016, the target was to get to £9.5 million within three years. Mini Gears is currently on target for £9.7 million this year.”

Big investment

During this growth, capacity became an issue as customers were asking Mini Gears to tender for new business, mainly in the aerospace, rail and nuclear sectors: “We found ourselves unable to take on this new work because of machine constraints in milling and gear cutting. After several meetings with our customers we advised them we were purchasing new machine tools to support their demands with long-term contracts in place,” Nigel Walker explains.

Mini Gears has purchased two additional XYZ 710 vertical machining centres for its milling section and a second new Haas VF/740. Both Haas machines feature magnetic tables to aid machining of parts as they eliminate the need for clamps, and the carousel holds enough tooling to avoid downtime for reloading.

June 2018 also saw the arrival of a gear shaping machine to increase gear cutting capacity. Owing to the growth of orders for small rails for seating mechanisms, Mini Gears had had to convert a second gear cutting machine to cut in linear motion.

“We installed a bespoke table designed by ourselves and manufactured locally,” Mr Walker says. “This was then retrofitted to the machine and it generates the rack form perfectly. A further machine will be converted early this year.”

Focus on delivery

Mini Gears now manufactures on average 135,000 parts per month with 175 different variants so managing the work and meeting customers’ delivery requirements is of paramount importance. Some key changes have been instigated to meet these objectives.

Manufacturing more complex parts meant that managing director Peter Durkin needed to change the structure of the company. He set up a senior engineering team from the pool of existing engineers and brought in a fourth member with a production design background. The team spends 100% of its time engineering solutions for manufacturing, establishing tooling requirements and offline programming before the job hits the shop floor.

To ensure the company’s on time delivery requirements a 15 minute production meeting is held every day comprising members of each department and senior engineers to discuss any issues needing to be resolved that could impact on lead-times. This daily communication has proved extremely successful.

Top of the agenda for 2019 is a total revamp of the Quality and Inspection department.

Mini Gears www.minigears.co.uk