An open house held last month at Hurco Europe’s headquarters, showroom and technical centre in High Wycombe attracted 70 visitors from 30 companies. The company took orders valued at £450,000 over the two days, providing an excellent springboard into 2022. Managing director David Waghorn says: “Despite the difficulties of trading during Covid and some disruption caused by Brexit, we ended our financial year at the end of October 2021 with our second highest turnover ever, only a little less than our record year of 2018.”

Close to 300 Hurco machining centres and lathes were sold into the UK and Ireland market during the company’s latest financial year period, nearly one-third of which went to first-time users of Hurco machine tools. As a postscript, Waghorn mentions that Hurco Europe plans to continue increasing its number of service engineers. The company added two service engineers during 2021 and plans to recruit another three in 2022, which will bring the total to 25.

For further information
www.hurco.co.uk

CNC machining services provider ‘Get It Made’ is offering a £10,000 grant to manufacturing start-ups led by under 30s. Those selected to receive the grant can spend the money on developing solutions to progress their chosen industry. The grant will provide manufactured parts (to the value of £10,000) and allow successful applicants to work with Get It Made’s engineers, resulting in a huge acceleration of the design and development process.

Get it Made’s manufacturing grant is available to start-up businesses that are smaller and currently less established in the manufacturing industry, and be led by a person under 30 years of age. The company must have launched in the past three years and have fewer than 25 employees. University-based research projects are also eligible for the grant. Applications close at midnight GMT on 31 March 2022.

For further information
https://get-it-made.co.uk/grants/under-30s/

Bystronic customers know that with powerful machines and optimised processes they obtain solutions that make them even more competitive. Accordingly, there was considerable interest at the recent Blechexpo 2021 exhibition in Germany, where Bystronic presented its latest technology in the areas of laser cutting, software and services.

In addition to manual production, a clear focus was on the topic of automation. Here, it was evident that Bystronic supports its customers, step by step, on the way to fully automatic production. Numerous customers came and showed great interest in the company’s solutions.

In his technical presentation on the topic of smart factories, Thorsten Stahl, product manager for software services, illustrated to the audience that anyone can venture the first step toward an intelligent factory. In doing so, he addressed everyday problems in production, and in particular, how they can be overcome with the BySoft Suite.

“We can digitalise your processes and present your business procedures in the digital world, and you can carry out agile, smooth and transparent production,” he said. “A smart factory is not for the faint of heart, but also not impossible.”

A further highlight was the Blechexpo Innovation Prize, now secured by Bystronic for the fifth time. The award is presented to the most outstanding exhibits. On this occasion, Bystronic was recognised (together with its collaboration partner AIRCO Systems GmbH) as the most innovative enterprise of the year in the category of separation and connection technology with the Blechexpo Award for ‘AIRCO Infinit Mixgas’.

For further information
www.bystronic.com