Clamason Industries Ltd is a privately owned, precision presswork manufacturer with a £8.5m annual turnover and 100 employees (75% of whom are in manufacturing functions), located on a two-acre site at Kingswinford, near Stourbridge, West Midlands, and a satellite operation in Nitra Slovakia.

Clamason Industries has an extremely diverse, 200-strong customer base, with exports exceeding 15% of output. Current turnover is evenly spread over five market sectors – automotive engineering, electrical accessories, electronics, building products and medical.

Majoring on technically complex parts in medium to high volumes, annual order quantities per part can range from 25,000 up to 200 million, although an average call-off would lie between 50,000 and 250,000 per year.

Healthcare, building improvement, security, telecommunications & automotive electronics products.

30% to 40%

The company philosophy is to purchase whatever tonnage or type of machinery may be required for the operations on new contracts as they arise.

Accordingly the strategy is mainly one of advancing the capability of the presswork process itself, an example being one state of the art Bruderer press in place for medical device manufacture with a second on order. Also improvements in presses generally & fault detectors. Two more presses are likely to be ordered for medical components & to be accompanied by the latest measurement & inspection technology.

Customer driven, but 2005 was £300K, 2006 is likely to be similar.

The last decade witnessed increasing pressures on UK manufacturing from producers with minimal labour costs & no health & safety system costs who are based in Taiwan, mainland China & South Korea, countries with largely undervalued currencies. However, the past three years have seen a bottoming-out of the decline in EC factories & definite improvements in sales, hence Clamason has undertaken investment in capital plant with new confidence.

By way of further investment & expansion, Clamason Industries has also opened a 10,000 sq ft satellite plant in Slovakia at Nitra, 80km east of Bratislava. This is part of Clamason’s strategy to stay close to first-tier automotive customers with demands of bi-weekly or even daily deliveries on a just-in-time basis. Parts manufactured at Kingswinford can be shipped to Nitra in flat pack form for labour-intensive second operations – welding, fabrication, assembly & finishing.

(a)
A £200,000 Bruderer press, model BSTA 250-75B, integrated with a decoiler and crop-off station, runs in a dedicated cell at high speeds of up to 1500 strokes per minute.

(b)
A Simac Masic “Stampede” 3D real time vision system which ensures zero-defect production of intricate and highly toleranced healthcare components, fed from the press in a continuous strip. A world away from the usual system of sample-based inspection, the Stampede provides 100% inspection of the thin metal parts, measuring four key features to a 50-micron tolerance.

(c)
In Metrology Clamason has a Nikon Nexiv 3020 non-contact, CNC video measuring system featuring a through-the-lens laser autofocus facility ensures the repeatability of small, complex and highly toleranced parts from large batch production. The Nikon Nexiv provides progressive data so that trends in key features can be identified and monitored, allowing the appropriate adjustments to be effected well before a dimension moves out of tolerance

More of the same equipment systems.

That is the only way to satisfy customer demand & to remain internationally competitive. In Kingswinford we can make components automatically as cheaply as anywhere in the world, because our processes are just not labour-intensive, and costs for materials and state-of-the-art capital plant are the same the world over – they are all purchased on the same global market.

In the leading-edge medical sector especially, customer confidentiality is paramount, so we cannot disclose customer or product details for these uses of new technology. Clamason can, however, quote the capabilities and procedures it has in place to ensure that its engineering solutions meet the stringent quality standards demanded by medical device protocols.

Firstly, Clamason differentiates itself by concentrating on high-end, technically complex parts – often safety-critical with product liability implications. For instance, it makes very intricate housings for three of the five airbag manufacturers in the World & has been designated by Delphi Automotive Systems, the World’s largest automotive supplier, as a “Worldwide Supplier of Choice”.

Secondly, Clamason is different because of its dedicated, specialist workforce, very low staff turnover & enlightened employee further education (FE) programme, all reflected in its Investors-in-People & National Training Awards.

Thirdly, private ownership with lean management lends the company the necessary flexibility & speed to react & adapt to modern customer demands. The strategy of boxing clever with nimble footwork & boldly entering new markets has proved itself when other British pressings manufacturers restricted in scope & ambition have closed down.

Nitra is 80 kilometres east of the Slovak capital, Bratislava with excellent road, rail, air and shipping (via the Danube) links to the rest of Europe. It was this central location which made it ideal to service a range of customers in the region.