Leicester-based Glenborough Engineering Co has bridged the skills gap by purchasing a ProtoTrak-controlled milling machine from XYZ Machine Tools (www.xyzmachinetools.com).

In addition to manufacturing precision sub-contract components, the company designs jigs and fixtures that are used in the production of car seat assemblies and special-purpose machines.

Many of these are produced in low volumes. Manufacturing these parts on vertical machining centres proves to be highly inefficient, so Glenborough uses a number of manual turret mills, operated by skilled machinists.

As the business grew, the company required more skilled machine operators, but they proved hard to find. Then manufacturing manager John Padkin and two colleagues were given a demonstration of the XYZ SMX 2500 bed mill, fitted with a ProtoTrak control system.

The simplicity of this control convinced them that they had found an alternative to manual machines for low-volume production, and an SMX 2500 was purchased. The plan was for an apprentice to operate the new machine, but general labourer Mitch Noble asked to receive training on the new machine, and Mr Padkin agreed.

“Within two says of returning from the XYZ training course, he was setting and programming the SMX 2500 unsupervised. He is now creating some quite complex components and has become extremely confident on the machine.”

After the success of this project, Glenborough is discussing the purchase of two more SMX bed mills – another SMX 2500 and a larger model — and two apprentices will be trained to operate them. Mr Padkin concludes: “We have certainly had our eyes opened to the potential of ProtoTrak for a business like ours.

"We now know that we do not need to rely on finding highly skilled machine operators for this type of low-volume production. ProtoTrak allows us to produce parts of equal quality, using the labour resources that we already have.”