Product category:
Industrial Development Agencies and services
News Release from: Manufacturing Advisory Service - East Midlands | Subject: MAS EM and Peak NTD
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 29 January 2008
Advisory service raises company
performance
Thanks to advice from the UK's Manufacturing Advisory Service, a manufacturer of ultrasonic testing equipment for the power generation and aerospace industries has improved its performance.
Peak NTD in Derby, UK's Derwent Business Centre, is one of the firms which has seen a marked improvement in its performance over the past year thanks to advice from the Manufacturing Advisory Service East Midlands (MAS EM) The company, run by a husband and wife team, designs, develops and manufactures ultrasonic testing equipment for the power generation and aerospace industries
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 1 Aug 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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The equipment tests metal for cracks using an ultrasonic probe, which is controlled electronically.
Once with Rolls-Royce, company owners, operations director, Andy Whittle and Alison Whittle, technical director, started the business 11 years ago.
Peak NTD took over one of MatEval's - a Rolls Royce company - main ultrasonic products called Micropulse 3 and have since gone from ,strength to strength,.
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Andy Whittle said: "Since we took over the product, we have further developed Micropulse and developed new products, growing the business to a point where we needed to bring some commercial expertise in to take us to the next level".
He said: "I've used outside experts before and MAS ranks up there above them all.
Their expertise was great value for money and has real and lasting benefits.
We've recently picked up orders with NRG in Holland and UTEX in Canada thanks to a focus on sales that MAS helped us their work".
Derbyshire's Business Advice Team (BAT), a nationwide business consultancy, supplied the MAS expertise.
It identified key strategic issues that were hindering the company's growth.
One problem was the focus on the technical aspects of the business and not enough on market development.
Simon Parke from BAT explained: "This company is developing leading edge instruments.
Other companies supply similar products, but Peak's are world class.
I have been re-focusing the business on a commercial footing rather than a technical one.
They need to go out and sell more products to customers across the world".
Peak's leading product is the Micropulse Phased Array system, which it developed thanks to a UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Smart Award.
The product enables customers to inspect the metal for defects using a multi-element electronic probe.
The probe can be made to simulate probes at set angles, rather than the previous technology, which relied on a number of separate probes at set angles.
Some of the potential benefits can be a quicker inspection as users don't have to keep changing the probes.
In the nuclear industry, this reduced operator intervention could lead to a lower frequency of exposure to radiation, said Peak.
The company currently exports to markets all over the world, including Argentina, France, Holland and Italy and has just completed an order for an organisation in Slovakia that inspects nuclear plants.
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