To realise its ambition of becoming the UK’s leading independent profiling and processing company, the PP Group consolidated its business interests last year by bringing the operations of its three manufacturing facilities in Salford, Gorton and St Helens under one roof — on a 110,000ft² six-acre site in Oldham that now employs 100 people.

The £9 million investment also included a 36m oxy-fuel and plasma cutting cell from Kerf Developments (www.kerfdevelopments.com), which has helped the company to reach a position where it is now profiling, processing, fabricating and welding more than 12,000 tonnes of steel a year.

The Kerf cell is processing over 400 tonnes of steel each month — almost 40% of the material that passes through the company’s doors.

Peter McCabe, the PP Group’s managing director, said: “In our previous factories, we had a 9 x 4m plasma cutting machine for processing steel up to 40mm thick and a 22 x 5m flame cutting machine for materials up to 200mm thick.

“Those machines were more than 10 years old, and we made the business decision not to bring them to the new factory.

We looked at replacing them with a more-efficient, cost-effective and user-friendly solution; Kerf Developments had exactly what we were looking for.”

The bespoke production cell supplied to PP Group has a 12 x 3.5m bed, an RUM 4500p single-gantry, 400A Lincoln Electric high-definition plasma cutting head (with Ultrasharp cut technology), along with a 24 x 3.5m table with two RUM4500g gantries, (each with four oxy-fuel flame cutting heads) — all on a single platform.

This single-bed configuration has streamlined work-flow and improved throughput, while the eight oxy-fuel heads have improved productivity by more than 35%.

Mr McCabe added: “Our business has grown by 10% in the year since we moved to the new factory, and the Kerf cutting cell is a major contributor to this growth.

“It has delivered productivity gains, throughput efficiency, savings in labour and consumables, and cost reductions.”