smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

UK manufacturers are thriving, having come through a challenging couple of years. Four business leaders talk to SmallBusiness.co.uk about how they are revolutionising the industry.

Adrian Maxwell, managing director, Fracino

Fracino is the UK’s only manufacturer of espresso and cappuccino coffee machines. My father started the business 47 years ago. Originally, we were just importing and selling machines for the Italian and Spanish manufacturers, but we started manufacturing machines in 1991.

Each machine is a complex piece of kit. I think you need to have good engineering experience because there are various skills required to do this job.

When we came on to the market, as you can imagine, we caused quite a storm. What we make in the UK is strong and robust. When we take the products abroad, the reaction is amazing. They like the quality aspect and the finish on the products. They like the fact that we use good-quality material – stainless steel, copper and brass.
We are expanding at the moment and we’ve bought a new factory in the past six months. We have two design engineers – both graduates – who are constantly developing products. Every year we try to launch a new model – this year it was the Piccino, a domestic machine. We noticed that we were selling quite a lot of small
semi-commercial machines into homes, but they are quite bulky.

I think we need to push the fact that we have quite a big manufacturing industry. We still have two large car producers, with Jaguar Land Rover in the UK and BMW making the Mini Cooper here.

Manufacturing isn’t a dirty word and we’re very good at engineering in this country – especially the high-tech products.

Nevil Hall, joint managing director, Millers Oils

We are a general lubricants company that has three main ranges for automotive, industrial and commercial vehicles. The company is independent and still family-owned. When I joined nine years ago, it was short of investment. We invested heavily in research and development at the point when everybody else was shutting their R&D facilities.

It is our work in motor sport that has brought us to prominence. We developed the automotive side because there was a clear requirement for high-quality products in the motor racing sector.

What has got us to the pinnacle of the sport is our use and development of nanotechnology engine oils, which arose as a direct result of searching for ways to emphasise our technical capability.

There is an enormous difference in size between nanoparticles – engineered particles that are incredibly small – and the particles in other oils. Nanotechnology has clear benefits for racing teams that run the same cars under the same circumstances – they’re instantly seeing three times the gearbox life.

I’m not aware of anyone else in Europe using nanotechnology. They’re developing it, they’re talking about it, but I don’t believe there’s anything else on the market. What I think we’ve done is disrupt the market with this technology.

This company has doubled its turnover in the past five years. The plans are to continue to invest heavily in R&D and also in manufacturing techniques to improve efficiency. At the minute we’re quite buoyant.

We took the opportunity to consolidate, expecting that business would be flat, but it has continued to climb for us. So I’m quite hopeful about British manufacturing. After all, it is our second biggest industry.

Simon Thomas, managing director, Asset International

The company manufactures plastic pipes for the water and construction industry, mainly for carrying wastewater. It’s a manufacturing process and product that’s unique to the UK but it was developed in Finland in the late 1980s. We manufacture under licence from Finnish company KWH.

In the first three years of manufacture, we were taking a scattergun approach, trying to service each and every market sector out there instead of focusing on one.

We’re really only a one-product company in that we only make plastic pipes. However, where we’ve been clever is to shape the pipes to take us into different market sectors. We’re producing a vast number of tailored or bespoke products that are unique to each and every project – that’s where innovation comes in and it’s why we brand ourselves as a solutions provider.

When we go to market, we need to be innovative and unique. It’s a very conservative and traditional industry, and if we can do something a bit different, it attracts attention.

I’m from an area of Wales where the primary industry was coal mining, so I’ve had first-hand experience of what it’s like for the manufacturing industry to be taken away. The feel-good factor that manufacturing tends to bring to
an economy is gone, I believe. It’s a very steep hill that manufacturing industry has to climb to get back to where it
should be within this country. We don’t seem to be proud of our manufacturing heritage, and because of that our reputation has suffered globally.

Grant Notman, head of sales and marketing, Wood & Douglas

We manufacture radio/wireless components, so we make parts that fit inside other companies’ devices. We have three locations – our site in Saffron Walden is responsible for mostly mechanical assembly; at Romsey we make more complex control systems; and the factory in Tadley manufactures software and hardware.

I think almost everything that we make is entirely unique to our company. We specialise in custom design, so almost all the companies we work with have a very specific physical space that they require our product to fit into. We go away, complete the design, get approval and meet international standards, and deliver
a worldwide product so that they can go to market.

There are plenty of uses for wireless, such as video surveillance, where radio waves are used to transmit high-resolution video across hundreds of kilometres. Railway stations use some of our finished products, where train information is fed to the passenger information bureau via a radio link.

Any risk taking is primarily in undertaking the development. It’s rare that people want to invest in the development of technology unless they have a need. So we have to continually develop towards radio standards and keep in touch with how those standards change. It’s Ofcom that regulates this industry.

Something that is unique to us is the automatic test equipment that we produce because that’s specific to the product. If we go through a test programme for any of our customers’ developments, we have to create a new test jig. For us, that’s a big investment.

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