Rossi Gear Motor Ltd UK relocates with view of establishing a Value adding facility
For more than 60 years, Rossi has been developing its business in the most demanding applications, becoming one of the world’s leading gearbox specialist. Rossi Gear Motors Ltd. is an affiliated company of the Italian Rossi SpA situated in Modena Italy, one of the largest manufacturers of Gear Reducers and Gear Motors in Europe. With a significant product focus on medium to heavy industrial applications the new UK facility allows the company to keep pace with the focus and development taking place not only from the parent company, but within the UK market as well.
Rossi Gear Motors UK Ltd was established in the mid 1980’s and all through the years has remained based at Bayton Road Industrial Estate in Coventry. Over time this facility had doubled in size but, it had become evident that the company needed to look to the future and ensure that a new facility was found that would allow improvement in all processes and allow for further expansion of local assembly of geared motors within the UK.
Local assembly within the UK of Rossi G series (helical bevel and helical parallel) and Planetary gearboxes was started in earnest in 2013 and since then the company has seen a marked improvement in its ability to meet on time demands. In the past a G series unit of size 250 (approx. 31500Nm) would have taken 4-6 weeks from Italy, the delivery of these within the UK can now be achieved in just a few days subject to components being available. “We have also invested in planetary components to assemble up to size 085 or M2max of 140,000Nm, within the UK” says Cliftin Bower, Rossi UK Managing Director
With the ability to meet the demands of a growing customer base a new facility was found, still within Coventry, and towards the end of 2014 the process of relocating the company was actioned. This new facility is 3 times the size of the previous one with a dedicated receiving and dispatch bay, assembly centre and general warehousing. The company has invested a significant amount of capital into the new facility to modernise it and to ensure it is a centre of excellence, promoting a positive working atmosphere for all staff.
A dedicated board room and training facility has also been created for staff and customers. Rossi training program consists of local catalogue, product, service and commercial training as well as a dedicated 2 week intensive training course held twice a year at our Modena facility. The training course in Italy covers applications, theoretical calculation, commercial understanding as well as how the parts are produced and the benefit of Rossi’s production and assembly knowhow. Some Italian competitors have a reputation of being price driven, Rossi’s focus is to be competitive but provide a long lasting product that meets the customers growing demands not just now but in the future as well, our training efforts are focused around this philosophy. A junior fitter undergoing an apprenticeship has also been nominated for the apprentice of the year award.
With the challenge of finding a facility that creates value for its customers, Rossi UK has also invested in a new spray booth facility. Cliftin Bower explains “until recently we were outsourcing the final finishing of the product, namely the painting for special applications such as those found in marine applications, to a third party. While we chose a partner that could meet the quality requirements we still found that we were experiencing delays due to shipping times and finding suitable time slots to have the product painted. With this investment we can ensure that we are fully in control of the complete aspect of the product from assembly to final finishing”.
This new spray booth allows us to bake the product (up to 70 degrees) once the paint has been applied significantly reducing the drying time. We have already seen the benefit of this equipment and expect it to add to our already competitive service offering within the market.
Rossi UK has seen a significant improvement in on time delivery performance across the board. “This improvement to the on time delivery has not just happened by chance. We have identified the bottle necks within our system and taken steps to correct or invest in corrective measures that have had meaningful results. For example have installed a new computer system globally to manage daily functions, together with our www.rossiforyou.com customer portal we can facilitate rapid data transfer to the correct people and departments that need to use this data. ” Says Cliftin, “we know the results are paying off, for example in January this year, we measured a delivery performance of 97% for our most popular product range, with an average order to dispatch time cycle of 4 days. Overall we have seen significant improvements in reducing the lead time in line with our customer requirements and at the same time meeting these deadline consistently. Obviously there is always room for improvement.”
Further investment in meeting on time delivery has been the investment in local assembly. Added to the assembly of products, is our focus on servicing products through our after sales service centre. We are developing this resource and the company is currently investigating the requirements to expand aftersales servicing to provide field based servicing.
Rossi UK has growth ambitions and with the investment in strategic value adding activities along with this new facility, the company feels it is perfectly placed to take advantage of opportunities in the market. “We know we have a great product and we needed to invest in improving the service offering to support this product” says Cliftin Bower, “working on our service offering and focusing on the needs of our customers is one of the reasons we have been a growing force over the last few years. We aren’t claiming to double our turnover, in a year or two, our aim is to continue to increase our customer base, and the turnover will automatically follow the right curve with this approach.”
Rossi Gearmotors Ltd
Unit F4_F6 Little Heath Industrial estate
Old church road – Coventry
CV6 7ND, United Kingdom
Tel. +44 2476 644646
Fax +44 2476 644535
info.uk@rossi-group.com
www.rossi-group.co.uk
