Family-owned Digbits has been supplying replacement digger parts and equipment to owners and operators of tracked excavators for 20 years. Co-owner Marcus Clay has shaped the company’s success and development through a number of well-calculated business moves, from buying the machine tools of a local subcontractor that had gone into administration, to purchasing two Yamazaki Mazak CNC machining centres to take machining in- house. Solutions reports.
says Mr Clay. “At the time, the aftermarket sales offering for owners of
y dad was a sales
manager for JCB in the mid-1980s,”
diggers and earthmoving equipment was limited and the big manufactures like Kubota, Hitachi and JCB had no provision for distributing replacement parts.
“Digger sales in the UK were on the up however and there was a clear gap in the market for us to stand independently from the manufacturers and offer high quality consumables for earthmoving machines. In 1991 we began buying and selling replacement excavator buckets, linkages and other attachments for a variety of vehicles ranging from 0.5 tonne mini-diggers right through to 80 tonne excavators.” He continues: “For the first 14 years we brought our stock from the same factories as JCB and Caterpillar – which meant we were offering the same quality of product at a more competitive price. The secret was in the branding. Digbits didn’t carry the recognised
branding of an international manufacturer, which meant that selling spare parts that brandished our corporate green instead of JCB’s well- known yellow logo allowed us to undercut the competition. “Word spread fast onsite and before long our customer base had expanded tenfold from word of mouth alone. To this day, over 50% of new customers come to us through the recommendation of an industry friend or colleague.” You would expect a company as highly aligned to the construction sector as Digbits to have suffered in the recent downturn, but Mr Clay is quick to explain that Digbits is, in many respects, recession- proof. “Throughout the housing boom, digger and excavator manufacturers offered attractive finance packages to their customers,” he says. “The property market was cash rich and broken diggers were
replaced instead of repaired. When the recent recession hit, contractors looked to replace perishable parts on
their machines to keep them working for as long as possible. The sale of second hand earth movers increased too which, again, brought more business our way.”
Construction levels intensified throughout the UK in the early years of the new Millennium which increased demand for consumables like excavator buckets and rubber tracks. However, the continual use of subcontractors for machined parts exposed Digbits to unforeseen leadtimes and these long delays often left customers disappointed. In 2005 Mr Clay took matters into his own hands and set out to find the root cause of the backlog. Little did he know that what he was about to discover would lead the company down a fast track path to expansion and to the conception of Digbits’ in-house engineering facility.
WWW.FLAMEHARDENERS.CO.UK Find out more at
mail@flamehardeners.co.uk
“Bucket linkages, pins and steel bushings were some of the parts that were subject to unpredictable leadtimes.” explains Paul Wise, engineering manager at Digbits. “These smaller products require specialist machining with
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