Machining and sourcing keeps products competitive

Mini Gears offers precision engineering and machining expertise, but has now added a global sourcing capability for material and components, to maintain competitive costs.

Mini Gears is a subcontract engineering company that has won many awards for innovation and machining excellence, who can also source material and components globally.

The company works alongside customers, providing assistance and suggestions in design where it can see improvements can be made in performance and costs.

Over the last few years the company has transformed itself from being a specialist gear manufacturer only, to a company now offering a full range of machining capacity at its 35,000sq ft factory in the UK, plus an extended product range including machined parts, gears, castings, forgings, stampings and fabrications through its global sourcing division, Components Worldwide.

This forward thinking company competes on a global scale and its ability to source and manufacture such a wide range of parts has resulted in its turnover increasing from GBP 5 million in 2004 to GBP 9 million in 2008.

To keep its customers products competitive the company has invested in the latest 5-axis CNC machines, restructured its UK factory and purchased a new 12,000ft2 factory in the Czech Republic.

"In the last four years material prices have increased by 90%," said Peter Durkin, technical director.

"To keep our customers' products competitive and to avoid losing their business to overseas competition we had to reduce our costs to avoid passing on all these increases.

Therefore we had to look at the cost of raw materials and components in conjunction with our manufacturing costs.

At our UK factory we have seen a 110% increase in the number of components produced over these last four years.

This has been achieved by restructuring the shop floor".

High volume CNC machines have been adapted into more medium volume producers by massively reducing set-up times and introducing more flexible tooling.

Durkin said: "We have moved over 100 machines around the shop floor so that their new locations gave the best productivity.

Eleven of our older machines were taken out of production as their Overall Equipment Effectiveness had dropped, and the cost of maintaining them was too high".

A massive investment was made in new machinery and Mini Gears purchased two Mazak Intergrex 300-IV 5-axis machine tools, which greatly reduced set-up times and work in progress downtime as the parts are manufactured in a one hit operation, thus reducing manufacturing costs.

"This latest technology will also enable us to compete in more specialist markets where high accuracy between multiple operations is critical," said Durkin.

"Through our global sourcing division, Components Worldwide, we source from China, where we have our own sourcing facility, employing English speaking engineers with years of experience in sourcing parts for western companies.

We have also started sourcing from India and Eastern Europe".

Last year Mini Gears purchased a machining factory in Sumperk in the Czech Republic giving an excellent base for expanding into Europe and extending its machining capacity.

Sourcing raw materials from low cost economies means that the parts can then, where necessary, be finish machined on the latest CNC machinery in one of the their own factories.

This combination of supply gives the most economic price and enables customers to retain their market competitiveness.

Components Worldwide/Mini Gears, a featured supplier at the Subcon show, will have a team of Technical Sales Engineers on stand F4 at Subcon, where there will be a range of gears on display, machined parts, racks, castings, forgings, stampings and fabrications.

Subcon is from April 22-24, 2008 at the NEC, Birmingham, UK.

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