Pennine Lancashire Business News Articles

Precision Polymer Engineering 'seals' their growth

Precision Polymer Engineering Ltd (PPE) was formed more than 30 years ago and is a specialist manufacturer of elastomer (rubber) seals used in a wide variety of industries but generally always at the high end of technology. During the last five years the company has achieved a growth rate of some 25% per annum.

Customers come from industries such as pharmaceutical plant and equipment, large diesel and gas turbines for marine and power generation, semiconductor equipment for the manufacture of memory chips and an increasing amount of business is found within aerospace. More than 80% of PPE’s products are exported – primarily to the USA, within the EU and increasingly to regions within Asia such as Taiwan.
PPE’s product offering can be best described as static low pressure seals commonly known as ‘O’ rings. The directors had decided that future growth in the company could not come from this product range alone and planned to introduce a range of high performance seals and bearing geometries to market. To do this successfully they needed to automate the design process.
The DDU helped the company to decide on the best way forward to achieve this and provided some financial support.

The method they used for processing orders was to generate design standards, tabulate prints and manually create drawings to enter into the ERP system for every item quoted. This process required some 6 man hours to complete over about 1 week.
In order to launch the product successfully the company needed to reduce their response time to customer orders and enquiries.
To achieve this objective the company decided to automate the process in order to reduce processing time from 1 week to half a day and labour input from 6 hours to 10 minutes.
The system structure for the new automated process required 2 pieces of bespoke software to be developed integrated between the existing Solid Works CAD system and the Syteline ERP system.

Mick Holland, Global Production Manager commented on the assistance given by the DDU "The support has enabled us to start horizontal diversification in the companies international markets which will lead to increases in turnover and staffing levels"

The project was completed in August 2008.