County Durham base Altec Engineering begins 2021 with a strengthened focus on the company’s automation and engineering capabilities following the sale of its CNC division in the latter part of 2020.
Altec Engineering’s heritage spans four decades and the company’s reputation for high levels of quality and customer service over the years were the catalysts for diversification and growth. As the company developed, two distinct business units emerged – Engineering: covering special purpose automation, integration, tooling and fixtures, and CNC: responsible for the production of high quality and high complexity machined components.
The recent sale of the CNC division now enables Altec Engineering to maintain a distinct focus on their core business areas, as explained by Lee Kerswell, Head of Business Development: “Now as a separate business Altec Engineering can forge ahead and implement our strategy of building upon our existing customer base and market sectors.
The renewed focus within the UK on manufacturing and re-shoring brings with it an increase demand for automation and technology based solutions, to allow manufacturers to achieve the productivity, quality and cost structure needed to remain competitive in a global market.” With an already strong team, the company is also currently recruiting additional resource within a number of areas of the business to facilitate the growth planned in 2021.
Altec Engineering has established itself as a trusted partner to many different UK manufacturers, supplying a wide range of services and solutions including; automation, special purpose equipment, system integration, engineering support and toolmaking. The company is also recognised as integration partners for a number of the major industrial robot suppliers and many of the systems designed and manufactured for customers incorporate robots alongside a wide range of other proprietary technologies.
The success of the business lies in its ability to design and build innovative and bespoke production automation systems, tailored to meet the demanding specifications of customers within multiple marketing sectors.
The example shown here is typical of the systems designed and built by Altec, where multiple technologies are integrated to provide a fully automated production solution. Here a SCARA robot, together with a rotary indexing system, machine vision system and welding system are used to produce a range of different component parts at the rate of one every 6 seconds. A combination of quick change tooling and part variant selection via the machine HMI, makes for simple and intuitive operation whilst minimising the time required to change between part types. Altec also provide full system documentation and operator training for each system as part of a turnkey solution, including ongoing service and support.
Altec’s Lee Kerswell concludes:” With an increasing number of UK companies now seeking to adopt greater levels of automation to mitigate the effects of skills and labour shortages, Altec, with our new focus is ideally positioned to support the drive to automate UK manufacturing.”
