In acquiring the business, Heat Trace is to take over the factory, and employ the four Brand
Rex employees who have been responsible for the operation of the Electron Beam Unit.
We are delighted that Alan Speed, Gordon Snape, Rod Egerton and Alan Lockett have
agreed to join HTL. All have extensive experience. Alan Speed, the Beam Manager, has
spent 30 years with Brand Rex and Gordon, Rod and Alan have all seen 16/17 years service
with BRL. We hope that we can avail ourselves of the remainder of their working lives!
The acquisition provides us with a number of benefits:-
- We gain control of the irradiation of our self-regulating heating cables (the one
process that has until now been sub-contracted) and enjoy cost savings.
- We take over a factory unit having much more space (any visitor to the Bredbury
plant in the last year or so will know how welcome this is.)
- We acquire a business as a going concern, and will continue to carry out
subcontract irradiation work for the existing customers of Brand Rex, and
indeed for Brand Rex themselves, who make cables in their not too distant
Leigh factory.
- The facility makes the manufacture of other products, such as electronic switch
es more attractive. (However these may be things for the future, and definitely
not for consideration at the this time.)
- Greater production facilities, discussed below.
The move will be difficult both logistically and for a lot of our employees. We plan to move
the production over a three-month period (1st July - 30th September 2005) and during that
time will operate at both sites.
Our target was to take all our employees with us and their response has been very
encouraging. For many it means much further to travel and, because of this, we have
reduced our standard working day by half an hour. We are also trying to encourage car
sharing with HTL bearing some of the costs for a period.
Of course, these measures and the larger premises and investment result in a substantial
increase in operating cost. The move therefore has to be underpinned by a corresponding
increase in sales and the company are confident about this....certainly the indications are
good.
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Electron Beam Unit Housing |
The increasing sales of FSS and FSU cables has brought with it production problems. As
we currently produce FSS/FSU heater core on the same extruder as low temperature products,
the slow speeds of FSS/FSU production have caused bottlenecks and delays.
GOOD NEWS! We are also acquiring a new extrusion line so that fluoropolymer and
polyethylene production can take place at the same time - hopefully bottlenecks will
become a thing of the past.
When that happens, we will definitely be ON THE MOVE!
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