2020 was a year like no other in terms of the unprecedented challenges faced by all businesses, despite this it allowed our paint division the time to review its business strategy and provided the opportunity to realise those objectives in order to place it in a very strong position once the impacts of the pandemic subside. As a result we thought it was a good time to summarise and reflect on some of the milestones and achievements made over the past 12 months:
- Having the right infrastructure is always essential to success and in this area we made an investment of £1/2 million on redeveloping an entire bay of the facility which in turn enabled us to house totally new spraying capacity in the form of 3 new spray booths. This additional capacity will meet the current and future needs of our customer base as well as releasing capacity for our NADCAP and other high specification clients. Increasingly the need to offer a one stop shop approach to surface treatments and allow for more expedient lead times has required additional capacity for pre treatments within the SWMF group, therefore a decision was taken to install an additional REACh compliant conversion coating facility which allows for parts to be processed quickly and also achieve the very strict time delay requirements as stipulated by many current specifications For the very same reasons as installing a pre treatment facility, further investment has also been made with the introduction of a brand new sub assembly facility to carry out processes such as pressing of inserts, bonding, and sealing. This installation was as a direct result of customer demand and has led to dramatic reduction in lead-time.
- As an example parts were traditionally processed to a base layer coating and then would have to go back to the customer for sub assembly before being received at another stage for final top coat. We now have the ability to dramatically remove waste and of course cost by eliminating these stages.
- Training has always been a major factor in the success of South West Metal Finishing and we pride ourselves on our in house training offered to all of our staff but also the external training that many of our team undertake. In 2020 we had opportunity to re-evaluate how we were going to recruit and effectively train our new recruits so they were well placed to become highly skilled and competent future employees. This led to the introduction of the SWMF training academy and this year we have successfully introduced 5 new apprentices to the group and at time of writing are looking for a fresh intake of apprentices for 2021 of a similar number.
- Towards the end of 2020 we strengthened our management structure within the business and Frank Nicholls has been appointed as our new site manager. Frank brings with him a wealth of experience within manufacturing and surface treatment sectors and spent many years of his career in aerospace. If you wish to get in contact with Frank about any paint enquiries you may have he can be contacted via his email which is frankn@swmf.co.uk. Additionally our business development team would be happy to receive your enquiry so please feel free to contact our BD manager Alan Prouse alanp@swmf.co.uk .
