ZCC Cutting Tools has now entered a strategic partnership with Renovo Solutions in the North East for the re-new and re-manufacture of its standard and special cutting tool solutions. MTDCNC spoke with David Wilsher from ZCC and Antony Gray from Renovo to find out more about the partnership between a global manufacturer and the Stanley based cutting tool manufacturer. David Wilsher from ZCC Cutting Tools tells MTDCNC: “We have announced a new strategic partnership for the renewing of our solid carbide cutting tools. We have been looking for a partner for some time, especially post-Brexit for the manufacturing specification re-new of round shank products. So, we wanted a partner that could reproduce and replicate our quality first and foremost. We were also looking for an exciting company that shares our business values and our growth plans and expectations.”
Antony Gray from Renovo Solutions says: “This is a massive opportunity for Renovo Solutions. We are a new, up and coming company. One of the key things was finding a strategic partner to grow the company. One of the key differences between us and other companies is that we have adopted from the outset an OEM mindset. We have invested in Industry 4.0 technology, employed highly skilled operators and adopted full OEM geometries, coatings and technology.” Alluding to the background of Renovo Solutions, Antony continues: “The journey started when I was working for technical distributor and I had a vision for the North East to start a grinding facility. There was a really big gap in the market and there was a knowledge gap.” Antony says: “Fundamentally, we are going to manufacture standard products, semi-standard products, special tooling and anything rotary within reason. We do reverse engineer tools and we can design and manufacture tools in-house. Quality is a key requirement of the company and every one is 100% aligned.”
David Wilsher continues: “We have known Renovo for some time and Antony and his team have been buying our raw rod materials for production of their own equipment. So, we have been discussing since 2020 the opportunity to grow and expand upon the partnership. We have been piloting the scheme privately for the past six months and the quality has been fantastic. We have seen some really good results with the re-new and remanufactured products. When we talk about re-new, there are obviously many companies that can re-grind cutting tools but we wanted to emphasise manufacturing specifications. So, with Renovo they have access to our techniques, our coatings, our solutions and also our raw materials. This means that when we have a product back from one of our customers, they will then receive the tool as a re-new product and not a regrind product.”
Looking at the non-standard lines, David continues: “The partnership is going to extend beyond re-new, so Renovo 100% under an NDA will exclusively manufacture special ZCC product lines here in the UK, which will be a huge benefit for our customers. During the pilot scheme, we worked with an aerospace customer where we won the business with our new manufactured product. We then set the challenge with Renovo to benchmark against our new product and we achieved 90% of performance. For a re-new product, I think that is fantastic. It bettered the performance of the previous supplier. We now ship regular quantities to Renovo for this customer. So, we can now confidently go to the market with the expectation that the re-new quality is near the new product.” Looking to the future, Antony says: “We have just moved from 1000sq/ft facility to 5000sq/ft and we have levelled up our operations and standardised everything. We have invested in more grinding machines from ANCA, so we just need to level out for a little while and then continue our growth.”
