NAA Member News: Quickgrind featured in The Parliamentary Review
Quickgrind Ltd designs, develops and manufactures solid carbide and high-performance steel cutting tools for companies all around the world. Managing Director Ross Howell told The Parliamentary Review about Quickgrind’s tools, which are available both off the shelf and custom-designed…
Quickgrind Ltd delivers its tooling expertise to the aerospace, automotive and engineering sectors – as well as to a variety of F1 teams.
After over 50 years of operating from our Tewkesbury base, we are undoubtedly the best-kept cutting tool secret in the UK and are the tooling expert behind some of the most well-known aerospace, aircraft, automotive, defence and medical subcontract companies. Our constant quest for innovation, higher quality and service excellence makes us their go-to partner for success.
Key to our success has been maintaining the financial stability of the company, ensuring we continue to make money by maximising our return on investments both now and in the future. In order to achieve this, our number-one priority is to ensure our team members are fully committed and have secure and satisfying employment. All of our employees are actively encouraged to be involved in the continuous improvement of the company and are fully aware of our goals.
Despite the general consensus in engineering being of an ageing workforce and a shortage of skilled younger workers, this is certainly not the situation at Quickgrind. Many of our operatives are in their early twenties, and a good few of them did not have any previous engineering training. Our employees come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but what they have in common is a very positive and flexible can-do attitude.
This transition from non-engineering careers is facilitated by our advanced cloud-based IT systems and a McDonald’s-like system approach. Our systems are unique and highly customised to our modus operandi, having been designed in-house and coded by our own team members.
In order to avoid being trapped in a departmental silo style of working, we have adopted a “flow based” operating model. This means we view the business as one system: from the time the order is received until the money is in the bank.
Adopting the flow-based approach revolves around the first law of manufacturing, which states: “All benefits will be directly related to the speed of flow of relevant information and materials”.
When everything is flowing well, service and delivery performance is good, and you are able to meet customer and client expectations. Quality improves too, as fewer mistakes are made, and when quality and service is consistently high, market share tends to grow.
This model requires maximum flexibility from our team members, and many of them are trained in numerous different operations, meaning they can cover for another when a member is absent and the flow is not interrupted.
We also pride ourselves on our flexibility and our focus on innovation, which has been integral to our success since the beginning and is the basis of our Infinite Possibilities ethos and “Total Solutions Engineering” programme.
The Infinite Possibilities ethos challenges the way buyers and programmers choose their cutting tools. Determining the best tool for the job has always meant turning to thick cutting tool catalogues and selecting a tool based on what the manufacturer wants to sell you.
In today’s fast-moving world, companies need to push the production strategy envelope and are always looking for innovative ways to stay ahead. Standard tooling can serve a purpose but can also lead to compromise that costs time and money: “Infinite Possibilities” means you can customise, not compromise.
A specialised cutting tool, combined with an optimised cutting strategy, means you can produce highly accurate, better-finished parts without hurting your bottom line.
For the full article please click here:
https://www.theparliamentaryreview.co.uk/organisations/quickgrind
