Stonehouse manufacturing facility
What was a stereotypical portal-framed factory building has been transformed into what is undoubtedly one of the best machine shop environments in the world. Given the lack of space constraints that previously faced the company in recent times at New Mills, significant improvements have been made to the environment through innovative ceiling design and construction to reduce noise levels, improved air-conditioning, the implementation of high specification oilmist extraction systems on almost all the machine tools, and the overall finish and appearance of the facility. The fact that all these operations are now under one roof is of great benefit in terms of improved organisation and efficiency.
In addition, there have been some significant capital commitments to coincide with the relocation such as additional Mazak FJV machines, a new anodising plant, new auto-deburring and raw material processing equipment, and future plans for improvements to cleaning technologies used throughout the various stages of piece part production. We now have some 150 employees at Stonehouse, with 70 machine tools producing around 300,000 parts each month.
Tool-vending has been introduced for consumable tooling, machine 'hubs' that are local to each machine group and provide an area for storage and management of all tooling and inspection equipment, namely DCC CMMs and facilities that are required to support each small group of machines. Previously, these facilities were centralised and had become inefficient and ineffective for the size of our operation.
The former Machine Hall at New Mills has been transformed into a pre-production factory housing a model-shop and pre-production machine shop, as well as a pre-production electronics facility and nursery assembly cells.
At Woodchester, the next phase of refurbishment includes a building formerly occupied by a tenant to create additional space for assembly and despatch.
In India, the new building located in Pune will enable the Group to manufacture components which it currently buys in, together with potential metrology products which had not been previously considered due to the cost of manufacture. Further application software will also be developed for the Group's existing and new products.
The new facility at Stonehouse has enabled Renishaw's Manufacturing Services Division (MSD) to plan the layout of the Group's piece part manufacturing operations within the 80,000 ft sq of factory space. The refurbishment, which commenced in April 2005, was completed in December 2005.