Coalville Glass and Glazing of Coalville, Leicestershire, have run a Stuga Flowline-3 for the last one and a half years and it has proven to revolutionise their business.
Concentrating mainly on new build installations Coalville are a successful fabricator of the L.B. Plastics Sheerframe system, which they have used for many years.
Production manager Chris Hemsley says that he just cannot imagine life without the Flowline now as it takes away most of the skills required at the front end of production, allowing Coalville to concentrate efforts further down the line. He also noted the number of comments from customers who were surprised at the improvement in quality and consistency of their windows, from what was already a good level. The company now makes the same number of windows with less operators together with much more production flexibility and this has also allowed them to run with less stock, further reducing manufacturing costs.
The company only needs one operator to run the machine and even he is not utilised anywhere near full time on it. Software is never an issue because Stuga always take care of all software issues quickly and efficiently.
The Coalville Flowline was the first of these machines to be built feeding from left to right, instead of right to left, but Stuga supplied on time and without problems caused by having to reverse the sophisticated Stuga software to work the opposite way.
Chris was also impressed with how quickly the machine was installed and up and running, as he had expected this to take many weeks, rather than the two to three weeks it did take. Dealing with a British machinery manufacturer has also paid dividends when it comes to spare parts supplies, with every conceivable part being available at the Stuga headquarters in Great Yarmouth. Service is also a pleasure with Stugas guarantee of an engineer within twenty four hours maximum in the event of a total breakdown. The Flowline has in fact been remarkably reliable says Chris but it is nice to have the peace of mind that there is such good back-up if it does go wrong.
For further information please call Stuga free on 0800 169 5444 or Coalville Glass & Glazing on 01530 837014.
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