ENGEL UK Managing Director, Nigel Baker, explains how a proactive attitude during the unprecedented challenges of the last year, has brought exceptional results for the company.
“ENGEL UK are closing this financial year with an order income 38% above plan and together with a strong project list, we are looking at a confident start to the 21/22 financial year.
As the worldwide Covid 19 pandemic began to show its might, it quickly became clear that injection moulders of plastic products and components would have a vital role to play.
Clearly, the first full lock down necessitated all businesses to adapt and rethink their strategies and a major criteria for ENGEL UK, was to support our customers in whatever ways they needed. We were able to offer free service visits to injection moulders manufacturing components for the NHS. A small, but appreciated gesture that we were happy to support.
Whilst adapting to the new way of working, with Zoom and Teams meetings, we were excited to be part of the ENGEL group’s response to the lockdown, where they took to virtual expo’s and webinars to maintain the flow of information for their customers. Video conferencing proved an invaluable tool for us to maintain communication with our market.
Acutely aware that downtime, for any reason, costs processors money ENGEL have developed the 24 hour e-connect customer portal, which gives customers the huge benefit of being able to stay informed of current service items, monitored components and upcoming deadlines at all times. In the event of an issue, the portal allows the customer to send a service request directly to ENGEL. Additionally, ENGEL have recently introduced the performance.boost facility. With the remote assistance of ENGEL applications engineers, through a totally secure connection, customers are able to identify optimisation potential and process support for their particular application.
Here in the UK, we continued with plans already made to adapt our Sales Team to better support key market sectors. Our established, experienced Technical Sales Managers are now dedicated to core competencies such as Medical, Packaging, Automotive and Technical to provide expert knowledge for customers in these fields.
Whilst ENGEL have remained on track with the introduction of a new generation of high performance hybrid and electric machines, particularly for the needs of the packaging sector, they have also made the servo hydraulic, dual platen Wintec t-win machine available in Europe. This machine, manufactured in China by Wintec, a member of the ENGEL Group, is a standardised injection moulding machine that is both powerful, quickly available and offers an attractive price – performance ratio. The ENGEL Group is the only supplier in the world that can offer plastics processors single-source solutions for the complete spectrum of their requirements – from standard single-component injection moulding to technologically sophisticated applications. I am delighted that our demonstration t-win 650t machine will be arriving at ENGEL UK in May and the team are already taking bookings for walk around, personalised video tours or tailored reality visits in a Covid secure environment.
Later this year ENGEL UK will take part, as always, in the Interplas Trade Fair and we will also be sponsoring the highly popular Plastics Industry Awards.
It has been made clear that injection moulding has a vital role to play in the rapid production of high volume, low cost, plastic components during this pandemic and moving forward. The agility and determination of our customers has been amazing and at ENGEL UK we are thankful to have been a part of their work.”
