Engineering company etches expansion plan after global contract wins

A Shropshire engineering company is targeting international expansion after boosting its export work by 10% in 2017.

Advanced Chemical Etching (ACE), which employs 50 people at its facility in Telford, has secured three big projects in aerospace, communications and the medical sector, taking overseas trade to 38% of its £5m turnover.

It comes after the company embarked on a continuous improvement drive that has increased on time delivery and right first time performance. Both factors proved crucial in it securing new contract wins.

“Our export activity has been steadily growing year-on-year since 2010, but the last seven months have definitely seen a spike that we’re hoping to sustain,” said managing director Ian Whateley.

“There may be an element of the pound slipping making us more competitive. However, a lot of the projects we are winning are extremely technical and not many firms around the world can deliver the complexity of components the customer requires.”

He said interest had come from countries such as Germany, Luxembourg, the United States, while encouragingly for post-Brexit scenarios, from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Thailand.

The company supplies anything from safety critical components for aircraft and cars to simple washers, electronic connectors and ornate clock faces.

Investment in its 25,000 sq ft facility in Telford has ensured it can make products in materials, including stainless steel, nickel alloys, copper, beryllium copper, phosphor bronze, brass and, with help from groundbreaking new processes, aluminium, titanium, molybdenum, nitinol and elgiloy.

The latest continuous improvement programme has been in operation for six months and has involved collecting data on current operating parameters and reviewing what is working well and what could be improved.

This has seen the firm alter its chemistry settings and introduce twice daily process control checks.

“We are really pleased with the results of this latest exercise and we now have daily improvement meetings to ensure all work instructions and operating procedures are being reviewed,” said Mr Whateley.

“It has also allowed us to create a robust new product introduction system with technically challenging jobs and new processes for exotic materials never before etched.”