Small is beautiful for Accurate Laser Cutting directors Jon Till and Steve Morgan; the Oldbury, West Midlands-headquartered sheet metal and plate laser cutting and bending operation caters to customers who place, perhaps, a £400 order for a small batch of components.
Although the order value of business from such customers may be beneath the interest of its competitors, Accurate Laser Cutting (www.accurate-laser.co.uk) wants the business, and in whatever format customers care to offer supporting information, from CAD files that can be sent straight to the shopfloor, to telephone bookings, faxed works orders (0121 520 4888), even walk-ins off the street clutching back-of-the-fag-packet drawings.
Speed of quoting, and of cutting, are some of the most important criteria in winning work in this market, and Accurate Laser aims to provide estimates within four working hours, and parts within three days (laser cutting) or four (cutting and bending).
“If we’re first back [to the customer], we have a better chance of converting the quote,” says Till. The four-hour claim is, in terms of weekday office hours: quotes received at 8 am will be processed by 12 pm; quotes received by 1 pm will be back by 5 pm. To meet those targets, he explains that sales staff are offered performance-related bonuses (the carrot) and an ‘empty tray policy’ (the stick), in which they must quote all of the orders that have come in before they leave the office. A bespoke quotation software package assists them. The work is scheduled and programmed onto the machines on the shopfloor by production manager Neil Tomkins and a small team of applications engineers. The 30-person business is heading for £4.5 million turnover this year, up from £1.5 million in 2010.
ROUND-THE-CLOCK WORKING
As a reflection of that growth profile, production kicked up a gear in March, when it was extended to weekend nights. For many years, the shop worked 24 hours during the working week only; in the last 18 months, it also ran a day shift at weekends. Now the operation works 24/7.
The company’s preference for lasers over punch profiling is in its name, but Till explains it anyway: lasers leave a clean cut that, unlike a punch, does not leave witness marks, or create a burred edge finish that needs smoothing off via a secondary operation; lasers also don’t require expensive tooling.
An average of 40 jobs a day are processed on two laser profilers: a brand-new Bystronic BySprint 4020 6 kW fibre laser (0844 848 5850), the first in the UK, and a CO2 laser-powered Bystronic 6 kW BySpeed 3015.
Production is really taking off with the new laser, cutting 5 mm at 6 m per minute, twice the speed of its previous 6 kW CO2 laser. As a result, the company needs fewer production staff.
It expects to buy another laser soon, as Till reveals: “We usually buy two lasers: two in and two out.” But the firm is anticipating further developments from Bystronic.
“It is so exciting. What a time to be in laser cutting. Punching is done. It has nowhere to go. But with lasers, we’re on the bow wave of a technology explosion.”
In fact, Accurate Laser Cutting’s Bystronic fibre laser is so hungry, the business is having trouble keeping up; it is planning to invest in cranes with vacuum handling attachments to speed up material handling of sheets into the machines, in addition to the two forklifts it runs.
An automated sheet handling system wouldn’t work, because of the diversity of materials used, a feature of the short-run nature of the firm’s work.
Most of its cutting work, in the order of 70%, sees bending as a follow-on process, Till says, even though the company tends more toward plate than sheet thicknesses. He admits that the reason that he can be so precise about the proportion is because he ran the numbers before investing in two large new CNC pressbrakes, a 4 m-capacity Bystronic Xpert 320 and 3 m-capacity Xpert 150, supplementing a three-year-old 3 m-capacity Amada (01562 749500) HFE II 130 pressbrake. It chose Bystronic for size reasons, to be able to bend for example a 4 m plate of 10 mm-thick mild steel in-house.
The pressbrakes’ controls’ software simplifies operation by displaying images of the final configuration of the part as bent, and also an unbent version. This allows it to employ less-experienced staff on the shopfloor. As Till states: “Deskilling is progress.” Although “there’s nothing like a master,” only one or two remain at the company, and they are getting harder to find, Tomkins points out.
Increasingly sophisticated software is also helping those in the office. Till says that the recent upgrade of job planning software BySoft 7, also from Bystronic, has seen the package reengineered; among its benefits are SolidWorks 3D CAD front end and improved parts nesting capability. Running a nearly complete Bystronic fleet additionally enables efficiency benefits, Till offers.
Production manager Neil Tomkins, left, and sales manager Mitchell Bradley inspect a laser-cut and bent part
Accurate Laser Cutting has not quite finished installing machines at its Oldbury, West Midlands site. Last year, the company bought the 7,500 ft2 industrial unit it has rented since it started in 2005, plus the 6,700 ft2 unit next door that had become vacant. Mortgaging the properties with bank Lloyds was less expensive in the long run, says Till, and sets a mark in the sand for its customers. “We’re here to stay,” he says, referring to the risk of going out of business. This long-overdue expansion (“We had probably outgrown it three years ago,” Till admits) enabled the company’s £500,000 expansion project, building new offices, installing a biomass-fired boiler and reorganising production. On the back of this extra scale, the Black Country job shop hired a full-time marketeer, Natalie Poole, to expand its market reach beyond the 700 current customers (in the last three months) and 2,300 others on its books. “We are quite well-known within a 20-mile region,” offers Till, “we are trying to increase that radius.”
So it might install one or two more machines, but no more. Although three or four laser profilers and the same number of pressbrakes might not seem like much, the director says that he is after what he calls “the magic formula”; he points out that he has witnessed job shops with twice as much equipment fail because of poor productivity and profitability.
EXPANDING A MODEL OF SUCCESS
Accurate Laser Cutting is also developing new circles. Three years ago, it began a joint venture job shop in Rotherham, Accurate Laser Cutting (SJS), with former Bystronic UK sales manager Stephen Rolfe, who Till got to know. “I could see that there was a bit more interest. He was always engaging in the running of the business,” he recalls. Together they set up the joint venture, which now operates a 4.4 kW BySprint Pro 3015 with CO2 laser and 3 m-capacity Bystronic XAct 160 pressbrake.
Although SJS is a separate company, it also represents the first test of a long-held idea of expanding the business beyond Birmingham, reveals Till, because it replicates the model that has found success there: a low-volume fast-turnaround job shop. “I’d like to see a depot in every manufacturing city in the UK; that’s the dream.” He concludes by saying that the company’s next goal is to roll out a new depot in the next 12-18 months.
