THE LASER USER
ISSUE 114 AUTUMN 2024 INTERVIEW
Q. How is business looking for 2024/25?
As part of my recent personal development, I set out a 10 year plan to grow the business to £50 million. We are looking to further diversify into new market sectors, and we are currently very Northern Ireland centric. Brexit should be an advantage in some ways to NI businesses as we have unfettered access to UK and EU markets.
Q. What are the biggest challenges you currently face?
The removal of access to the European workforce has caused a major issue to lots of businesses, especially hospitality and manufacturing. We see the availability of talent to be critical to the
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is no feed-in tariff available to us, but even so, with regional funding to install the technology, we anticipate a pay back in under 3 years through reductions of 18 to 20% of our electricity bills. Our modern lasers are more efficient than the CO2
lasers they replaced and
we have implemented a carbon dashboard that monitors our raw material, fuel and transport as well as real time electricity usage. Net Zero is a bigger goal and we are working towards 4 of the UN Strategic Development Goals to follow that path.
Q. How do you see the acceleration of AI impacting your sector?
I set out a 10 year plan to grow the business to £50 million
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future we are planning. This year we hired a Director of People and Culture, Nicola Purvis. Her job will be to bring in new talent and look after our current workforce. Succession planning and the recruiting the next generation, as well as simultaneously caring for the wellbeing of the current staff, will be key to our success. Hiring skilled staff has been a challenge and we have found a supply of staff from the Philippines, with 30 of our 175 staff coming from there.
Q. How much of your business is enabled by laser processing?
Every piece of metal that we deliver as a finished part has gone through the lasers. In the early years we were 80% laser cutting and 20% fabricating and now the balance has shifted. We have 7 press brakes from TRUMPF and multiple MIG welding cells. So now we are 80% fabrication and 20% pure laser cutting. We haven’t yet switched over to hand-held laser welding but that is something we are open to consider for the future. Like many subcontract fabricators we are supplying low volume and high mix rather than contract high volume manufacturing of the same parts.
Q. How are you addressing the move towards Net Zero?
We plan to be Carbon Neutral by the end of 2024. Recently we installed 250 kW of capacity in solar-PV panels on our roof. There
I have observed a lot of ignorance in the manufacturing sector about how AI could help. The primary benefit I can foresee is the mining of the vast amount of data that we are collecting. Some time ago, we attached clamp-meters to monitor the power going to all of our machines, so we can see what they consume and when. We are also monitoring our gas consumption (nitrogen) from our bulk supply. Our data is also connected to TruTops from TRUMPF that can be accessed remotely to diagnose maintenance and troubleshooting.
Q. What is the best thing about AILU membership for you?
We have been AILU members for a long time, since we got into laser processing. We have found a really good community of like- minded companies in our sector. Even though we haven’t attended many of the annual meetings, we value the surveys and sharing of information that these enable. We recognise the common goal of making businesses like ours more efficient.
We recognise AILU's common goal of making businesses like ours more efficient.
“ ” Contact: Mark Hutchinson
Mark@hutchinson-engineering.co.uk https://hutchinson-engineering.co.uk/
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