Seco Tools (UK) hails first event in new home a major success

Promoted as being a unique event, owing, in part, to the number of Seco Technical Partners exhibiting at the show (21 in total), the sheer depth and breadth of manufacturing technologies represented and on view, and that it was held in a real life production environment, the Open House certainly lived up to its billing. Says Richard Jelfs, Seco's managing director: "We wanted to create an inspiring and practical event that was truly customer-focused and one that would demonstrate unequivocally to visitors the improvements in productivity and performance benefits that can be achieved by collaboration, through sharing best practice and by working in partnership with Seco." But it wasn't just the composition of the Open House that made it unique and that inspired visitors to attend, says the company. The fact that the event was taking place at Seco's new, much publicised and state-of-the-art Technology Centre was an obvious draw, as was the ability of visitors to see so many machining/cutting demonstrations taking place in a real production environment. Explains Justin Kite, Seco Marketing: "Unlike many major UK cutting tool companies, we have a unique Custom Tool production facility here at our Technology Centre where bespoke manufacturing and tooling solutions are designed and developed for a growing number of our customers – and this proved the ideal setting for the machining demonstrations. "Here, visitors could talk direct to us and to our machine tool, CADCAM, workholding, metrology and cutting fluid partners; see numerous innovative and challenging machining demonstrations taking place using the latest Seco tooling solutions; find out more about a range of our customer-focused services such as Secopoint (our bespoke automated tool dispensing system); and discuss their specific manufacturing issues and challenges with engineers from our Component Engineering and Projects Teams." Speaking for Technical Partner Mills CNC, Tony Dale says: "Business was brisk throughout the two days. Visitors were impressed with the large Doosan Puma 480L lathe we exhibited on our stand and with the live cutting demonstration (organised by Seco and Mills application engineers), using Seco's large diameter Performax SD602 modular drill." Finally, reflecting on the Open House success, Mr Jelfs says: "It was fantastic seeing so many people making the effort to visit us. "When you organise an event like this, you hope that your promotions will capture the hearts and minds of your target audiences, and that they will be motivated to attend. "I believe that the involvement by so many of our Partners was critical and that our Open House proposition based on the power of positive, reciprocal and mutually-beneficial partnerships was also a telling factor that contributed to the event's uniqueness and success." Seco intends to run similar type events at its Technology Centre in the future.