Recession opens subcontracting doors for Hydrafeed

Renowned for its range of award winning CNC barfeeders, Milton Keynes-based Hydrafeed had to show its resourcefulness during the recent economic downturn with its subcontracting operations, traditionally a small part of its business, emerging as a major growth area.

Manufacturing almost all of the components for its barfeeders in-house, Hydrafeed has always had manufacturing capacity at its disposal and has used excess capacity in the past to provide a localised sub-contract service. However, when the downturn in orders for new machine tools and associated barfeed units from its principle OEM customers started to bite, recent investment in machining capacity provided an opportunity to Hydrafeed's management.

Switching capacity to offer more subcontract work has seen Hydrafeed develop regular business machining and fabricating components for customers across industry sectors, including aerospace, defence, automotive, medical, and the retail point of sale environment. Producing batches from one-off to hundreds-off Hydrafeed provides a flexible service, including faxban and kanban supply solutions.

With a shopfloor staff of 44 skilled and experienced people Hydrafeed knew it had the resources to provide a subcontract service for small to medium-sized batch production, making use of its own barfeed products to allow unmanned running on the turning section through the night. However, it also recognised that it was taking a leap into an extremely competitive, and at the time difficult, market place.

Consequently, Hydrafeed has appointed Daren Drew (picture, left) as production manager with the task of reducing manufacturing costs and devising processes that would make best use of the existing capacity and to investigate further investments.

Author
Michael Richards

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