Lift off scheme reduces costs

Copely Developments has reduced its costs thanks to a scheme called Lift Off that helps East Midlands aerospace companies boost their profits.

Leicestershire manufacturing company Copely Developments has reduced its costs by a potential GBP120,000 thanks to a scheme called Lift Off that helps East Midlands aerospace companies boost their profits.

Copely Developments in Thurmaston which manufactures specialist hose and tubing for a variety of uses, including critical instrument tubing for the Eurofighter Typhoon jet, worked with an expert in 'lean manufacturing' from the Manufacturing Advisory Service East Midlands (MAS EM), the organisation responsible for delivering Lift Off in the region.

Malcolm Brown, one of MAS' lean manufacturing experts, explained: "I looked at two aspects of Copely's manufacturing processes: their down time in between different machine processes and the overall manufacturing process.

I walked the floor to look at different processes and advised where they could save time".

"For example, Copely use dies in their production and had to wait for them to be pre-heated.

We worked out that a huge amount of time could be saved by pre-heating the dies so that there was no time wasted in waiting them to heat up to the right temperature".

The Lift Off programme provided Copely with four sessions over two months, plus a detailed report for implementation.

Copely's works director Stephen Walton said: "Our business runs 24 hours a day on three shifts, so our production process never stops.

This means that all the small improvements we identified to get our products through production more quickly have an enormous cumulative effect on our productivity.

We now have a better assembly system with less wasted time and movement of product".

Stephen continued: "The real benefit of working with MAS was that they have experts who see these things quickly and then help to communicate them to our team leaders.

Having that outside expert view gives everything more credibility, but you have to be prepared to invest in making the changes yourself or it never works.

"Once we have put all the findings into action, we could save a staggering 10 per cent or GBP120,000 on our costs.

Needless to say, we are looking at working with MAS again".

The Lift Off programme is heavily subsidised and is available to manufacturing companies which are connected to the aerospace industry and based in an Objective 2 area of the region.

It can provide help on a range of business areas including developing new workforce skills, introducing new business competencies and processes plus marketing support to look at new markets and diversification.

MAS is looking for companies to take advantage of this offer before March 2007.

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