ContiTech boosts turnover to £28m

Aug 25 2009 by Iain Laing, The Journal

PRODUCTIVITY at a North East manufacturer is at an all-time high thanks to help from a team of experts.

ContiTech Beattie Ltd, in Ashington, Northumberland, has for almost half a decade been a sector leader in the manufacture of hoses, fittings and fluid transfer solutions.

With assistance from MAS North East engineers, the company has more than doubled its “delivery on time” targets from 40% to 85% as well as boosting turnover from £16m in 2004 to £28m last year.

The productivity work has coincided with a dramatic upturn in contracts at ContiTech Beattie, which employs 84 people at Ashington and 12 in Aberdeen, which has recently introduced a nightshift to deal with an influx of work from the oil and gas industry.

Peter Stone, manufacturing manager at Ashington, said: “The work we have been doing with MAS NE is not only helping us co-ordinate the new work, but deliver it on time to the customer.

“By addressing issues like machine start-up time, cycle time and updating computer software we are ensuring the machines are running closer to their maximum operating capacity. While the interventions from the MAS NE engineers were essential to our improvement in delivery, real credit must go to the workforce.

“The employees have taken on board the recommendations and actually suggested some of their own, all of which are investigated and some of which have been adopted.”

MAS NE engineers have been working at ContiTech Beattie since 2004 and in that time have trained Peter Stone and production manager Keith Darling as change agents to continue productivity improvements at the plant. However, both are quick to point out that most of the workforce is as dedicated as them.

“Once the employees started to see the interventions working they really bought into the idea of continuous improvement,” said Keith.

“Without them and the commitment of our specially trained internal change agents like Jason Bell, the work of MAS NE would never have succeeded, but the workforce not only implemented change, they put real effort into finding improvements of their own.”

For further information on the full package of support, visit www.businesslink.gov.uk/northeast  or Tel: 0845 600 9006.