Bicester-based
Open Mind Technologies UK, a world-leading CAD/CAM developer, has expanded its service team with the appointment of Gareth Clarke, Matthew Brill and Victor Fapohunda as applications engineers to bolster its pre-and post-sales departments.
Mr Brill has accelerated his career progression since leaving school more than 10 years ago. He has completed a foundation degree in motorsport technology and from university, he worked as a number one mechanic for an international motor racing team before moving into manufacturing where he spent several years working for a high-end sub-contract manufacturer in the motorsport industry. Firstly, he was employed as an assembly technician and machine setter and he rapidly evolved to CNC programming on three and five-axis machines, rapidly becoming lead programmer before joining Open Mind.
Also joining the team is Mr Clarke, an engineer who started his career more than 10 years ago. Working for a number of sub-contract manufacturers, he has risen from CNC machining and programming to becoming a team leader and subsequently head of programming in his last role before joining Open Mind.
Mr Clarke has comprehensive three, four and five-axis experience on a wide variety of machine tools and has worked on a number of CAM systems. In his most recent role as a head of programming for a prestigious sub-contractor, he was pivotal in the daily communication and support provided to several major Formula One teams, a position that ensures he will feel at home working with Open Mind UK’s high-profile and demanding customers. Completing the trio of new arrivals is Victor Fapohunda, an engineer who started his career pathway as an apprentice machinist almost a decade ago. He has since progressed as a machinist and more recently held down posts as a production lead with extensive programming experience with hyperMILL.
Mr Fapohunda started his apprenticeship at 16 and then became the charge hand/production manager by the age of 21. He has worked extensively in the medical research sector, manufacturing parts for cancer research and cryogenics, staying there for nearly seven years and will be utilising this experience to take over the programming of knee joints for the Open Mind team while also project managing the roll-out of Open Mind’s Hummingbird (MES) in the UK.
Dynamic teamOpen Mind UK managing director Adrian Smith said: “Our business is continually growing in the UK and has outgrown our internal business model. To further enhance our excellent level of service and customer support, we needed to restructure our highly skilled application team. Part of this strategy has been to divide our applications team into pre-sales and post-sales engineers, giving them greater autonomy with customers — and allowing dedicated engineers to maximise their skillset to the advantage of the end user. This will deliver an even better customer experience, making our team more dynamic and responsive than ever before.“
“To implement this strategy, we needed to grow the applications team and simultaneously inject talent with a fresh new approach. The appointment of Gareth, Matthew and Victor will certainly build upon our robust new structure and help us to deliver a foundation for future growth. We are delighted the new engineers have joined.”
He concluded: “To support the new application engineers, we have added more internal resources such as dedicated hotlines, a dedicated training room and ongoing enhancements to hyperMILL, such as availability from the cloud.”