Article Date: 29-03-2010

In order to meet the demand of their fast-growing customer base, Merc has just invested £177,000 in new machinery to support their ever increasing workload.

Despite the fact that the economic downturn hit the company’s order book early in 2009, Merc’s intensive marketing campaign and investments in staff training have produced real benefits. Merc have found some shelter in their niche markets (Oil & Gas and Defence) and over the past 12 months, the company has managed to win orders from 42 new customers from a wide range of industries including Motorsport and Formula 1.

Backed up by these good results, Merc has recently been awarded a £40,000 grant from the local council towards the cost of a Mazak SQT250 CNC lathe and a third Dah Lih 1020B vertical machining centre with heavy duty machining spindle which will allow us to do heavier work.

In order to deal with the inspection bottlenecks caused by our increased workload, Merc Engineering has also made major investments to extend their inspection department. The company’s inspection room was partly demolished in January 2010 and rebuilt with an extra 20% floor space which enabled us to take on an additional quality inspector and purchase a new Mitutoyo Crysta ApoCMM machine which will be delivered in April 2010. 

The new CMM machine will be delivered with the latest version of the Mitutoyo CMM software, which will significantly increase our inspection output, therefore enabling us to offer competitive lead times to our customers.