S itting on the boundary of County Durham and Northumberland, Consett enjoyed the fruits of being a steel town in the 18th and 19th centuries, but then experienced deprivation as that UK industry sector later became dominated by Sheffield. The Consett Iron Company was established in 1864 as a successor to the original Derwent Iron Company that started up in 1840, when the first blast furnaces were introduced. Over the next 100 years, Consett developed into one of the world’s most prominent steel-making towns, and became synonymous with the industry – making the steel for the Blackpool Tower and early nuclear submarines. Residents comment on the unearthly glow that the works used to cast over the town, which was renowned for the cooling towers and other plant dominating the skyline. At the height of the sector’s boom, a pall of red dust hung over Consett – composed of atmospheric iron oxide from steelmaking. In 1980, under a Thatcher-led Conservative government, Consett’s steelworks was closed for good, leading to industrial unrest, the loss of 3,700 jobs, and an unemployment rate of 36% the following year – double the national average. The decline was characterised by local people as ‘the murder of a town’. Since then, regeneration projects in the 1990s have aimed to improve its fortunes. Tobias Heintz, managing director of Pinnacle Re-Tec – an small manufacturer that reverse-engineers pumps and pump components for sectors including oil and gas and power generation – based his business on an industrial estate in Consett when he set it up seven years ago, having formerly worked for the Weir Group in Glasgow. Heintz describes the region as beautiful and unpretentious, with normal people doing normal things. “The people are dedicated and hardworking,” he says. However, as elsewhere in the country, skills are a problem. Half of Pinnacle’s workforce of 34 is aged over 60, Heintz says, and half are under 30, with very few between either age group – a sign of the decline of apprenticeships during the industry’s lean years. However, he is positive about the young people the firm employs. “I don’t see any of the traits that are mentioned negatively about the younger generation,” he says. “I don’t see any trace of them in the candidates we’re hiring, or in the people Engineering companies in the North East of England are diversifying in order to survive in the global marketplace, but a skills shortage remains a concern for some employers. Ben Hargreaves reports Northern lights 28 OCTOBER 2014 PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
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S itting on the boundary of County
Durham and Northumberland,
Consett enjoyed the fruits of
being a steel town in the 18th and 19th
centuries, but then experienced
deprivation as that UK industry sector
later became dominated by Sheffield.
The Consett Iron Company was
established in 1864 as a successor to the
original Derwent Iron Company that started
up in 1840, when the first blast furnaces
were introduced. Over the next 100 years,
Consett developed into one of the world’s
most prominent steel-making towns, and
became synonymous with the industry
– making the steel for the Blackpool Tower
and early nuclear submarines.
Residents comment on the unearthly
glow that the works used to cast over the
town, which was renowned for the cooling
towers and other plant dominating the
skyline. At the height of the sector’s boom,
a pall of red dust hung over Consett –
composed of atmospheric iron oxide from
steelmaking.
In 1980, under a Thatcher-led
Conservative government, Consett’s
steelworks was closed for good, leading
to industrial unrest, the loss of 3,700 jobs,
and an unemployment rate of 36% the
following year – double the national
average. The decline was characterised by
local people as ‘the murder of a town’.
Since then, regeneration projects in the
1990s have aimed to improve its fortunes.
Tobias Heintz, managing director of
Pinnacle Re-Tec – an small manufacturer
that reverse-engineers pumps and pump
components for sectors including oil and
gas and power generation – based his
business on an industrial estate in Consett
when he set it up seven years ago, having
formerly worked for the Weir Group in
Glasgow. Heintz describes the region as
beautiful and unpretentious, with normal
people doing normal things. “The people
are dedicated and hardworking,” he says.
However, as elsewhere in the country,
skills are a problem. Half of Pinnacle’s
workforce of 34 is aged over 60, Heintz
says, and half are under 30, with very few
between either age group – a sign of the
decline of apprenticeships during the
industry’s lean years.
However, he is positive about the young
people the firm employs. “I don’t see any
of the traits that are mentioned negatively
about the younger generation,” he says. “I
don’t see any trace of them in the
candidates we’re hiring, or in the people
Engineering companies in the North East of England are diversifying in order to survive in the global marketplace, but a skills shortage remains a concern for some employers. Ben Hargreaves reports
Northern lights
28 OCTOBER 2014 PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
PE53.p28-32.Northeast_v2.indd 28 24/09/2014 15:15
PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING OCTOBER 2014 29
Reverse-engineering is kept as
simple as possible, with the minimum
number of points taken from original
equipment, so laser scanning isn’t used,
because it generates high volumes of
data. “You can ascertain diameter with
three points, so all of our scanning is
done with mechanical probes,” says
Heintz. “We can manipulate them and
bend them the way we want to. We build
up a minimal model that’s less complex,
with smaller files, and it’s far easier to
WE BUILD A MODEL THAT’S LESS COMPLEX AND EASIER TO MANIPULATE. THE LESS DATA YOU HAVE, THE BETTER
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Bridge club: Companies in the North East are expanding their horizons to embrace new products
that are being sent to us. The college
sends great kids, and we take them
onboard.” The challenge will be finding
more as the business expands, he adds.
Pinnacle Re-Tec uses traditional
measurement technologies such as
Vernier calipers, micrometers and CMMs
to measure components from pumps or
complete pieces of kit that have been
damaged, create CAD models, and
produce new versions to order, through
casting and machining. The castings are
outsourced to local suppliers when
possible, although some larger items are
shipped in from Heintz’s native Germany.
The key is making sure that the pump
components are manufactured to the
original design without access to
engineering drawings – and more swiftly
and cheaply than the OEM can manage.
M A N U F A C T U R I N G
Compressed-air excellence: Dräger has invested in automation at its breathing apparatus plant in Blyth
North East
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WWW.MTS-CFD.COM
MTS offers consultancy services in flow simulation using Computational Fluid Dynamics.
030_PE1014.indd 1 24/09/2014 11:38
M A N U F A C T U R I N G
PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING OCTOBER 2014 31
manipulate. It’s all about simplicity – the
less data you have, the better.”
An impeller blade might be captured
once, for example, and then replicated over
and over again, with each blade being
placed equidistant in the computer model.
Reverse-engineering a design is the
quickest part of the process, sometimes
taking a matter of hours, but producing
large castings can take weeks or months.
“For medium-sized castings I go to
Germany, because they provide a better
service when it comes to delivery times,”
he says. The business makes its living by
producing parts on time – because delays
to oil or electricity production caused by
pump failure are so expensive – and
penalties are written into its contracts if
components are delayed.
Heintz admits the company’s services,
many of which are exported, aren’t cheap,
but knows he has a big selling point in
being able to outmanoeuvre OEM pump
manufacturers in responsiveness. “There
are companies that can make an impeller,
or shaft, or casing. It’s not so difficult to get
it right, but we have to get it right every
day, with every single part. We are very
accurate, and high-speed. And if the main
oil transfer pump at an installation goes
down, you will hear about it,” he says.
Germany is where Heintz trained – he
also has an MBA from graduate business
school Insead – and he holds the protected
title of the traditional engineer’s degree
Diplom-Ingenieur, which is equivalent to a
masters degree. Heintz acknowledges that
this gives engineers in Germany an
advantage over their peers in the UK.
Internationally, however, he believes
British engineering is regarded as among
the best in the world. “Most countries have
a good view of British engineering –
perhaps better than the Brits themselves.”
Heintz also believes that the UK
engineering environment has improved. “I
remember chatting with a guy from the
Treasury in 2004 and he was saying that
we didn’t need engineering any more. The
climate for small engineering businesses
has improved. The help we get for
exporting is miles better, through UKTI and
UK Export Finance – tools the like of which
German manufacturers have had for
decades.
“The government is now publicly
pushing engineering. There are a lot of
clever people in this country who might
have chosen a career in the City. Those
people may go into engineering.”
Another small company in the region
that’s doing well is Tharsus, a contract
manufacturing firm based in Blyth,
Northumberland, 20km north-east of
Newcastle on the coast.
As we went to press, the company was
waiting to find out whether it had won the
award for best SME at this year’s IMechE
Manufacturing Excellence Awards. Such an
achievement would represent a real
turnaround at Tharsus, which had to lay off
half its staff during the recession and has
reinvented itself as a state-of-the-art
design and manufacturing collaborator that
brings innovative ideas to fruition.
Tharsus’s roots are as a ‘metal-bashing’
shop with a 50-year heritage, founded in
1964 and now wholly owned by Brian
Palmer, a former automotive engineer who
began his career at Nissan in nearby
Sunderland. In Blyth, which like Consett is
deprived, the company is providing
employment for 140 people, with the
promise of more to jobs to come and land
next to its facility available for expansion.
Tharsus saw a 75% drop in orders at
the height of the financial crisis, says
Palmer. “Traditional sheet metal working
isn’t a scalable business model. There’s a
handful of firms with turnovers of more
than £20 million. This is now a knowledge-
based business.”
That business includes making 12
component washers a day for Safety Kleen
and a hush-hush project developing a
robotics system for a FTSE 250-listed firm,
as well as manufacturing products for
Rapiscan, which produces security
equipment for airports. Metal fabrication
remains part of the business, but a small
one. Tharsus’s growth is being generated
by further diversification into contract
manufacturing and innovation.
“For a traditional metal basher to
convert to the kind of business we are isn’t
an easy step. We spent a lot of money
getting to where we are. We want to prove
that we did the right thing,” says Palmer.
There has had to be a willingness to
embrace new markets and ideas, and to
take risks, he says. There has also been a
desire to embrace a flexible, lean and
scalable production environment, to share
some of the upfront risk involved in
developing new designs, but to also ensure
a sound commercial model is in place to
exploit manufacturing.
It has not always been easy to convince
others of the business case, admits
Palmer. “It probably took us two years to
understand it. There were a lot of channels
in the market that have turned into blind
alleys – but you need to go down them,
and engage with customers on the way.”
North East
A WILLINGNESS TO EMBRACE NEW MARKETS AND IDEAS WAS NEEDEDRescue remedy: Fire services globally use Dräger equipment
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But Tharsus has the engineers to
succeed, he says. “If all we did was quite
conservative projects, with surefire
commercial winners, this wouldn’t be an
exciting place to be an engineer. But it is.”
Former MX finalist Dräger – which
picked up the overall winner award at the
IMechE Manufacturing Excellence Awards
in 2012 – manufactures compressed-air
breathing apparatus just down the road
from Tharsus. Part of a German, family-
owned multinational manufacturing firm,
the company is the design authority for that
type of equipment in the group.
As well as manufacturing, Dräger
carries out research and development at
the Blyth facility. The company makes
high-specification, composite material-
based breathing cylinders with glass-fibre
protective layers, using a high degree of
automation on the factory floor to reduce
labour costs. The breathing-apparatus
business was originally established on the
site more than 50 years ago and has since
been acquired by the German firm, says
Michael Norris – an American and former
Cummins man who runs Dräger in the UK.
“Because there’s such expertise here,
there has never been the need to think
about going anywhere else for this work,”
he says. In fact, some work that was taking
place overseas is now coming back to the
UK plant, including electronics work that
was being carried out in Malaysia.
“The technical side is less a driver than
the economic side,” says Norris, citing the
inflation of overseas wages as a key factor,
as well as the rising cost of materials and
transport. “After a while, that disparity
between wages here and overseas
changed. If you put the systems, products
and processes in place, people are just as
capable of manufacturing overseas as they
are here. If you don’t provide good
leadership or infrastructure, most issues lie
in the systems that allow people to do their
jobs. If quality issues exist, it’s because you
didn’t put the processes in place.”
Automation should be used on the
shopfloor to take out variation in a process
and thereby improve it, he says. This
process would continue to enhance quality
and bring down cost at Dräger.
Norris, from Ohio, has worked in the
British engineering industry for 20 years.
“There’s some brilliantly talented
engineering creativity here, but getting
ideas to market is a struggle,” he says.
Successful companies can’t rest on
their laurels. Efficiency improvements have
to be made continuously, he says. “The
best way of ensuring you become obsolete
is to think you’re too bloody good.” Q
Seta helps employers in region to plug skills gap
Robin Lockwood is the chief executive of training organisation Seta, which for decades has been helping engineering companies in the North East make their workforces more skilled. Seta is a not-for-profit group training association and also a registered charity, set up to service the training needs of engineering businesses.
Seta is the largest engineering training centre in Tyne & Wear and has its own workshops, which include state-of-the-art CNC lathes and machining centres.
From its Washington base, it offers engineering apprenticeships, traineeships, and both standard and bespoke commercial training courses.
Lockwood says Seta is working with several new companies that wouldn’t previously have taken apprentices on. “That’s an indication that people see the need to do something about skills, and are in a position to make a long-term commitment to skills.” It doesn’t make sense to think of the engineering industry in the North East as a homogenous group, he adds, and some firms are faring better than others – those in automotive, for example – although the overall picture is much brighter than it was during the financial crisis.
Seta says many engineering and manufacturing companies in the UK are struggling to find workers with the technical skills they need. Other companies might have the right skills, but are concerned that they have an ageing workforce. “These two problems could seriously restrict a company’s ability to step up production as the economic recovery gathers pace,” the organisation says.
Lockwood says the pool of workers available to industry has diminished. “Almost all our employers tell us they’re struggling to fill key posts. The workforce is ageing: there are lots of companies with talented, skilled people in their early 60s. What do they do next? Apprenticeships can provide workforce continuity.”
Seta delivers traditional engineering apprenticeships of up to three-and-a-half years, where most of the time is spent on on-the-job training. “We’re one of the original group training associations that was set up in the 1960s,” Lockwood says. “The key is to work with employers to make sure that training fits what they’re looking for.” The organisation has a contract with the Skills Funding Agency, which ensures that for 16-18 year-olds, apprenticeships are funded to level three. For 19-year-olds and over, firms are expected to provide half of the funding.
Companies are obliged to pay salaries to trainees. This can be a barrier to widespread adoption of apprenticeship programmes, especially for small employers. “It’s about empowering and equipping youngsters for a career in industry, where they have to graft,” says Lockwood.
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32 OCTOBER 2014 PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
Pump primer: Reverse-engineering at Pinnacle Re-Tec begins with scanning and CAD models
North East
IF WE DID ONLY CONSERVATIVE PROJECTS, THIS WOULDN’T BE AN EXCITING PLACE TO WORK