Subcontractor Colbree Precision was based within two hundred yards of the Buncefield depot and the blast destroyed its factory and most of its equipment.
When the Buncefield petrol storage facility in Hemel Hempstead exploded last December the effect on neighbouring companies was devastating. subcontractor Colbree Precision was based within a two hundred yards of the depot and the blast destroyed its factory and most of its equipment. But what could have been a complete disaster for the company has actually allowed it to develop new ways of working by investing in three new Nakamura-Tome turning centres from UK representative Turning Technologies.

As director Steve Bree explains, Colbree makes most of its smaller turned parts on bar fed sliding head machines, but before the fire it only had single spindle CNC machines for parts bigger than 32mm diameter.

Not only was Steve unhappy with their reliability, but they didn't fit in with his desire to cut out costly and time consuming multiple operations.

When the single spindle machines were destroyed in the fire Steve wasn't sorry to see them go.

'Although we lost that larger CNC capacity, we had already been looking round for alternatives - and in particular we were thinking of investing in Nakamura twin-spindle twin-turret lathes so that we could expand one hit machining,' he says.

'Obviously, in many ways we would have preferred it if the fire hadn't happened, but when it did we tried to make that work to our advantage as an opportunity to change the way we worked.' The Nakamura machines that Colbree invested in - two WT-150 turning centres and one Super NTJ - are all twin-spindle, twin-turret machines that allow complete components to be produced in one set up.

The WT150 machines have 51mm bar capacity, the Super NTJ has 65mm bar capacity.

All three machines are equipped with 24 tool stations per turret, including 12 driven powerful driven tool positions, and are designed to be highly precise, rigid, yet compact production machines.

The Super NTJ also has a +/- 90o B-axis on the upper turret.

This means that the parts can also be machined on multiple angled faces and contour milled in one set up during the turning cycle.

Colbree's major customers in sectors such medical equipment, defence, oil and aerospace often require complex parts with many auxiliary milled and drilled features, which had required further operations on machining centres.

With the new Nakamura machines these can easily be completed in one hit - and the B-axis on the Super NTJ opens up even more possibilities.

'With the B-axis we can actually swivel the turret round and do features such as angled holes.

The only way we could do this before was as another operation on a milling machine.

Doing it on the same machine as the turning obviously reduces the manufacturing time and maintains accuracy.

We used to have three milling machines and now we have cut that down to one - the more work you can do while you are turning the better,' says Steve Bree.

'With these new machines we can do things we couldn't do before and improve cycle times on the work we are already doing.

They have made us more competitive.' The speed with which Colbree has bounced back from what could have been a crippling blow has been impressive.

It was back in full production in new premises within eight weeks of the blast - thanks to good disaster recovery insurance and suppliers who were prepared to make an extra effort.

'Turning Technologies pulled out all the stops to help us back into production as quickly as possible.

They took a chance on our verbal order and were able to rescheduled and reallocate machines.

Businesses both large and small are regularly presented with an array of IT 'solutions' with unfathomable acronyms that promise tempting sales and productivity boosts. But what do terms such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Sales Intelligence (SI) actually mean? Where did it all start and what relevance do they have for industrial manufacturing and distribution companies.

Before CRM was even dreamt of, there was something called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

This acronym can be traced back to the 1960s and early methods of inventory control, but was later understood as the business strategy that promised to automate the 'back-office', provide financial reporting and control the supply chain.

It was in the early 1990s, when companies first started to build extensive ERP systems to automate and organise their data; that is also when business intelligence (BI) first emerged.

BI is a general term used to refer to the various ways in which a company analyses data, for example financial, operational or sales information, and the increased availability of company data was perceived as a boon for this process.

The initial problem with BI was, however, that as the new systems collected more and more information, it became impossible to extract what was relevant quickly and efficiently and deliver it to employees who needed it the most, rendering the massive amounts of data virtually useless.

Increasingly sophisticated tools and the advent of data warehousing have gone some way towards bridging this gap between available and useful data, but the process can still be complex and expensive.

Meanwhile, this trend towards harnessing and using key data had spread to the 'front office', and heralded the arrival of customer relationship management (CRM) in the mid-1990s.

In the early years, CRM simply referred to the software used to help businesses manage their customer information, predominantly sales force automation software (SFA) that focused on customer contact management.

It is estimated that the global market for CRM services and solutions is now worth 4.8 billion US Dollars, which gives some indication as to how far the market has developed since those early days.

Now businesses can choose from a wide array of CRM 'solutions' ranging from web-based systems aimed at small companies to sophisticated knowledge management solutions suitable for multi-national enterprises with millions of customers.

So where does CRM and related technologies fit with industrial manufacturing and distribution companies?

Traditionally, industry has been at the forefront of technology, but often in terms of front office software it has been a little slow in adapting to new technology, mainly because the implementation of a new software system has traditionally required a disproportionate amount of time and caused a similarly large amount of disruption.

There are also unique challenges faced by large scale manufacturers and distributors in that the sheer size of the average product range and inventory means there is a huge amount of data to handle and there will inevitably be legacy systems to deal with.

The need to win market share in a climate of increasing consolidation also means that they cannot afford to rush into a software purchase without being certain it is tailored to their needs.

In any industry, the key to making a decision about buying software is to be sure you understand what business problem it is actually a 'solution' for.

This may seem obvious but it's surprising just how few businesses actually take the time to do this and end up buying software that is too expensive, too onerous to fully implement and that the company rarely uses to anything near it's potential.

If the primary objective of a CRM system is to support the sales and administration teams, then why could it not be pro-active in actually identifying sales opportunities and alerting users to when customers started to drift away?

This is where Sales Intelligence (SI) was born, Vecta, one of the leading UK providers of SI solutions for example developed and implemented its first products during the late 90's.

Traditional CRM passively supports conventional sales techniques, often designed to drive 'new customer acquisition', but providing little in the way of delivering insight into the buying patterns of the all important existing customer base and so is unable to drive the sales effort.

It is designed to help salespeople record soft customer information, but it is much less effective for identifying new customers or retaining and selling more to existing ones.

A good Sales Intelligence system however will include advanced CRM style contact management functionality but will also extract the critical operational information it needs from existing back-office and accounting systems, which means there is no need to invest in an expensive CRM or BI solution.

It also avoids the long implementation period of traditional BI solutions that have to be built-to-order often by the user, and avoids the typical data 'overload' caused by the BI system when it is up and running.

Sales Intelligence is designed specifically around this premise that successful sales depend on identifying the right opportunities at the right time.

All the information needed to find new sales opportunities and identify customer issues is somewhere within your company's databases, and Sales Intelligence software simply automates the extraction of this knowledge and delivers it to the sales team.

Provided by vendors such as Vecta, it works by monitoring and analysing the buying patterns of customers by drawing data from existing accounts and enterprise software.

Irregularities and other trends in customer spending will trigger alerts that translate into sales leads delivered straight to the relevant sales representatives.

If, on the other hand, you need in-depth information to review and analyse business processes, then you may wish to purchase a full BI system.

Buyer beware, however, traditional BI solutions are seldom straightforward and users often have to build and implement systems themselves.

Similarly with CRM systems, salespeople are usually required to input data before they get useful information back, so end user adoption is far from guaranteed.

Put simply, all of these technologies are concerned with information management and, equally importantly, the every day use of that information.

Before considering any technology investment, it is vital that distributors identify the exact business requirement the promised information will meet.

Once this is established, they must not shy away from asking robust questions of all suppliers and mapping them against clearly deliverable business objectives.

Avilion has drastically reduced mill-turning cycle times with a new type of lathe from Index that supports and moves the turrets using kinematically-actuated plates sliding over the bed.
Luxury tap and shower system manufacturer, Avilion, has drastically reduced mill-turning cycle times with a new type of lathe from Index that supports and moves the turrets using kinematically-actuated plates sliding over the bed, instead of conventional compound slides. It is the first of the German manufacturer's C-Series machines to be installed in the UK and was supplied through sole agent, Geo Kingsbury Machine Tools. Said Steve Pope, Manufacturing Development Engineer at Avilion's Rainham factory, 'The twin-spindle, triple-turret, fixed-head lathe produces parts in a single set-up in half, and sometimes one third, of the time taken on our single-spindle, single-turret machines.

Even comparing like with like, surprisingly it is around 30 per cent quicker than our conventional twin-spindle lathes.' Such fast cutting cycles result in part from the opposed spindle having 150 mm of X-axis movement in addition to 600 mm of longitudinal travel - a configuration normally found only on a sliding-head lathe, according to Mr Pope.

The second spindle's movements can be coupled electronically with the two-axis motion of the lower, double-sided, 24-tool turret, which can simultaneously be working with the upper turret at the main spindle, allowing three tools to be in cut simultaneously.

Each turret has a 70 mm Y-axis for extra versatility when mill-turning highly complex components, easily achieving tolerances down to +/- 0.02 mm on seals, +/- 0.05 mm for other features.

Rapid traverse rates of 25 m/min in X and 50 m/min in Z, and acceleration of 1g, are achieved by not having to move a bulky compound turret slide using conventional ballscrews, leading to short idle times.

The distance between the turret centreline and the point at which it is driven is shorter than for a compound slide, making it several times stiffer and more accurate.

Glass linear scales provide positional feedback.

Continued Mr Pope, 'We will produce 30 to 40 of our most complex brass components on our Index C-Series lathe from 13 mm to 65 mm bar, and billets up to 80 mm in diameter, as we prefer to machine our components from solid rather than rely on castings.

Every part will be machined on the reverse and a cycle will often include 50 per cent milling, drilling and tapping; sometimes a lot more.

'Such is the capability of the machine to slash cycle times, 24 hours a day, and reduce unit manufacturing cost that we have been redesigning our components, where necessary, to maximise the capabilities of the C65 lathe.' Again with high productivity in mind, Avilion has invested in one of the very few Kurt Breuning Profimat bar magazines in the UK to feed the Index lathe.

Changeover to a different bar diameter can be carried out in seconds, or a maximum of 10 minutes if the liner needs to be exchanged.