Vend delivers MAD benefits to motorsport manufacturer

The Padiham-based Mini Sport Group has been supplying its customers with parts for the iconic Mini for over 50 years. Since 2005 many of these parts have been manufactured in-house by group company Motorsport Advanced Developments (MAD).

While MAD’s focus was initially on the Groups’ requirements, its reputation for quality grew and the business now supplies parts to a wide range of customers. This includes customers in sectors from the automotive and chemical through to the aerospace and defence industries with batch quantities ranging from one-off R&D parts through to 100,000+ volume production. This broadening of its customer base has seen an increased demand for the latest machine tools, cutting tools and workholding. Of course, this requires more space to house them.

Daniel Harper, MAD’s Managing Director says: “In 2019, we broke ground on a new building that would double our available floor space. That was completed in early 2020 and then came Covid and lockdown. From March to May 2020, things were challenging, and then the mail order side of the Mini Sport business just took off. By August, we were back to full staff and production, and we have just kept ramping it up.”

The timing of the situation was ideal. Just before the lockdown, MAD had ordered a Mazak i600 with a multi-pallet system. This is installed alongside a Mazak QuickTurn lathe and a further QuickTurn 250MSY, which brings the total to 12 Mazak machines on-site. “Recently, we have invested over £600,000 in machine tools, in addition to the cost of the new building,” says Daniel.        

To support this increased machining demand, MAD turned to long-term tooling partner Ceratizit UK & Ireland, with which it has worked with from the outset of the business. As an existing user of Ceratizit’s vending systems with two Tom60 vending machines, the challenge was to supply an increased tool storage capacity without compromising floor space. The solution was the installation of the TOM840 from Ceratizit, which replaced the two existing units. This TOM840 has a maximum capacity of 840 tools in compartments that can be adjusted to take a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

“In a typical scenario, a TOM840 vend machine will hold 5 times the number of tools compared to a TOM 60 unit in a similar amount of floorspace,” says Tony Pennington, Managing Director, Ceratizit UK & Ireland.

The Ceratizit TOM vending system also provides users with detailed traceability. With the ability to track the distribution of every tool from the time of vend to which the operator took the tool. It also provides a facility to monitor costs. With its in-built SIM card, orders to replenish stock are automatically communicated and sent to the team of dedicated vending support staff based at Ceratizit’s office in Sheffield. Stock within the machine is then replenished by a Ceratizit Tool Service Engineer. Each month an invoice is raised and, as the stock within the TOM840 is supplied on a consignment basis, only the tools taken from the vend are charged. A further advantage of the consignment stock is that MAD can never be left with obsolete tools. Whenever an update is released, the tools are replaced. 

The improved service offered by the TOM840 vending machine is just one part of the reason that Daniel and his team at MAD have worked with Ceratizit for so many years. “We have worked with Ceratizit since 2005, in particular with Nigel Walls our local Technical Sales Engineer. He is always on hand to offer advice on the choice of tools and even manufacturing methods,” says Daniel. “We are a tight-knit family company and, we like to deal with companies with the same philosophy as us. We work with companies that will pull together to make things work, in that respect Ceratizit gives us everything we need.”