Manufacturer relocates to Telford to increase efficiency

Kerstar, a manufacturer of industrial vacuum cleaners has relocated its production to Filtermist International Limited’s headquarters in Telford.

Selling Type H and Atex rated models, Kerstar was purchased by Filtermist in 2019, an oil mist and filtration specialist.

It has relocated from Northampton following a ‘lean’ manufacturing project and will centralise its operations to Shropshire to increase efficiency to customers. There are two sites in Telford – one for manufacturing and one for assembly and dispatch.

A product manager has also been appointed to explore new branding and opportunities within its network of UK resellers and distributors throughout Europe, India, Singapore and Australasia.

James Stansfield, CEO at Filtermist said it was clear that being located across multiple sites was causing production challenges.

He said: “Consolidating all of our manufacturing operations in one location allows us to have a better sight of production at all times. It also enables us to share expertise and resources amongst our teams and gives us better control over the quality of our products.

“With the help of MCPG, we devised a comprehensive 14-month project plan to ensure the move went as smoothly as possible.”

Work began in October 2020 with the aim of full production occurring in Telford by December 2021.

This included documenting all procedures to support knowledge transfer from the existing Kerstar staff to new team members.

Ben Kimpton, the new product manager at Kerstar said: “We will be exhibiting at the Interclean show in Amsterdam in May and are looking forward to finally being able to meet our existing European distributors face-to-face as the pandemic has so far prevented us from being able to do this.”