Global
Support
Background
With 350 people located in America and Europe, NPL is in
a unique situation to support its global customers. This
concept was extended further in January 2004 when NPL joined
ARRK, the largest tooling and product development group
in the world.
ARRK has over 100 sites spanning the globe and with comprehensive
manufacturing facilities in North America, Europe, Japan
and the Asia-Pacific region.
Full-line Network
Within the ARRK group of companies we can offer component
design and engineering through to prototypes for both metal
castings and plastic parts. ARRK manufacturing companies
can even support customers by becoming their supplier for
high volume production of plastic parts.
Benefits
The
formation of the Joint Venture in Mexico and the subsequent
merger with ARRK has caused considerable interest from major
customers who are located across the world. Numerous projects
have now been manufactured on one continent for use on another.
The benefits are considerable but include:
 |
Access
to low cost manufacturing in Mexico and Asia |
|
Local
support, regardless of where tooling was constructed |
|
Splitting
large projects between manufacturing sites to compress
timing by operating in parallel. |
|
Local
knowledge of clients' production and tooling practices |
| |
|
NPL-Ditemsa
is now benefiting from the addition of 15 European specialists
who collectively have over 350 years of relevant industry
experience.
A good
example of NPL's global approach to manufacturing was a
batch of semi-permanent molds for cylinder heads. Due to
pressure of other projects we split the project between
Mexico and the UK to be able to meet the customer's tight
timeline. All 3d CAD modelling was carried out in Mexico
and cavity form components were shared between the two sites
with all components being inspected and assembled in Mexico.
The first four molds were successfully delivered on-time
in 12 weeks from the start of the project.
