Partnership with Heller pays dividends for Kawasaki

The plant – home of the Staffa motor – is continuing to expand its activities and its markets. Its strength lies in its ability to remain competitive with other Kawasaki plants throughout the world by keeping productivity high and overhead low. “Our goal is to keep manufacturing in Plymouth. To do that we must be competitive and successful on a global level,” said sales and marketing director Steve Cardew. Some three years ago, a Heller MCi 16 horizontal machining centre was installed to increase capacity. Since then, the company has modified its strategy for purchasing machine tools and equipment. “We realised that to continue to compete effectively on a global scale we could achieve more by entering into partnerships with our suppliers in the same way that we enter into partnerships with our customers. Heller had to be high on our list of potential partners. We came to respect Heller and value their judgement and their honesty in the installation and commissioning of the first MCi16, even though we had not sought a turnkey package. During the 16 months the machine has been operating it has not missed a beat”. When a capacity increase was again required, a Heller was the obvious choice because of the performance of both Heller and the machine itself. As before, Heller undertook a variety of work outside of the formal contract, including advice on process development, fixturing and tooling, to ensure that the second machine was installed effortlessly and would perform despite a stringently tight timescale. In the case of the third machine, Heller is again heavily involved at the detail level. Although Kawasaki is controlling the process development, design and manufacture of the fixtures and tooling package, Heller engineers are working closely with Kawasaki’s own engineers to ensure process optimisation and machine performance – “Even to the extent that Heller is working on process improvement and reducing cycle time for the component still further to help us maintain and even improve our competitive edge,” explained Mr Cardew. “Heller is prepared to undertake this even though, by achieving our objectives, we will reduce our future machine requirement. This demonstrates a level of support and a capability which we have not found readily in other suppliers.”