Fracino’s success in broadening its European and world-wide horizons reinforces the fact that manufacturing in the UK can be globally competitive — albeit with a little help from an Italian-built all-electric CNC tube-bending and end-forming machine in this case.
The multi-award-winning third-generation family concern is marking 52 years in business after being founded in a garden shed in 1963 by Frank Maxwell, a former machine tool designer at Alfred Herbert.
His passion for coffee came from holidays in Italy and led to a successful business importing and selling coffee machines to catering establishments around the UK. In the late 1980s, Frank was joined in the business by his son — and current managing director — Adrian Maxwell, a former Rolls-Royce engineer.
The resulting combination of talent took the business to new heights; its turnover doubled, and it won the accolade of being the second-best world-wide distributor of the Spanish coffee machines that it was importing. However, demand began to outstrip supply — a situation that led the father-and-son team to look at manufacturing their own range of machines.
Adrian Maxwell says: “Manufacturing in-house turned out to be the best decision we made. In the first year, we produced 30 machines, all of which were sold within the UK. Orders were growing, and we took advantage of the weak pound that followed the financial collapse of 2008 to launch an export arm.
"We focused our marketing message on the British values of high-quality build, durability and reliability — based on the fact that the first machines we built were still in good working order.
“We were confident to promote the fact that Fracino coffee machines, made in Birmingham, are the finest in the world. This strategy, combined with our investment in manufacturing, ensured that we would remain globally competitive; our machines sell for 15-20% less than comparable equipment, in spite of the current strength of the pound.”
Increased turnover
The success of its export drive has seen Fracino double its turnover to over £4 million since 2008, and the company is currently producing more than 4,000 commercial and domestic espresso machines a year. However, this strong sales growth also brought production issues, with a large percentage of the manufacturing work — including much of the tube bending for the coffee machines’ water delivery systems — having to be sub-contracted.
“We recognised that we needed to bring this work back in-house in order to control lead times and quality, so we purchased a new building next to our existing site, doubling the size of our premises. Over the following 12 months, we created a sheet-metal and tube-working facility. Our tube-bending initially consisted of a manually loaded machine, but after a visit to Italy, where we saw the benefits of automated systems from BLM, we placed an order for a 4-Runner machine.”
The BLM 4-Runner — supplied by Ampthill-based BLM Group UK Ltd (
www.blmgroup.com) — is a complete tube-bending, end-forming and swarfless cutting cell in one unit, taking tube directly from coil and straightening it prior to processing it. The machine can form bends with fixed or variable radii, and the end-forming can be a combination of ram and rotary forming passes. The key to the machine’s success is the significant gains in productivity that result from combining these processes into an automated cycle.
“The introduction of the BLM 4-Runner has revolutionised our tube production. Tubes that used to take 3.5min to process on our old machine are now completed in just 15sec. The speed is incredible, so much so that we have moved from a bottleneck situation to being in a position where we don’t have to run the machine every day, as it keeps us ahead of the build schedule.”
As well as dramatically shortening cycle times, problems of lead times on material have been eliminated by switching from straight tube to coil. Furthermore, there has been a 20% reduction in waste material — and the time required to change from one job to another is considerably less.
These reduced set-up times are achieved via the BLM 4-Runner’s ability to store the appropriate settings for each electric axis with the part program, eliminating any adjustments when changing batches. The manufacturing environment also benefits from the machine’s all-electric technology, which eliminates the need for hydraulics and provides electricity savings of up to 80% when compared with older tube-bending systems.