Manufacturing and Engineering Magazine Volume 425 - January 2016 | Page 35

MANUFACTURING & ENGINEERING HELIX TOOL COMPANY
stronger relationship between the business
and its customers.
The savings Helix has been able to find for
its clients have strengthened its own reputation. Working across a variety of sectors
including aerospace, medicine, automotive
and power generation, it has recently developed a growing presence in the oil and gas
sector. The downturn experienced within the
sector has seen businesses grow increasingly
concerned with streamlining productivity
and finding efficiency savings. Helix’s proven
expertise in addition to its line side supply of
high performance cutting tools has made it
an ideal partner.
“A difficult market has created opportunities for us. A lot of our customers are coming to
us and saying how can we increase productivity, capacity and reduce costs to become competitive. In challenging times we are actually
growing our market share because customers
are recognising they needed somebody who
brings more value to them than just selling
tools,” acknowledges Robinson.
“It’s a closed-loop package,” he adds.
“Alongside best in class tooling, we offer an
unmanned, totally secure tool store. The savings we have made for our customers is not by
being cheaper but through cost saving analysis
and the implementation of processes that have
increased productivity.”
The company’s confident growth shows
no signs of stopping in 2016 but Robinson’s
ambitions go much further than the bottom
line. Having opened a second office in 2014
at the Advanced Manufacturing Park in
South Yorkshire, Helix’s founder wants to
give back to the industry that has been so
rewarding to him. This has seen the company
work with the AMRC training centre in

Engineering the Next Generation

“The savings we have
made for our customers
is not by being cheaper
but through cost saving
analysis and the
implementation of
processes that have
increased productivity”

Rotherham to deliver its apprenticeship
scheme. Its latest success story is the promotion of apprentice Jake Corbally-Lidgett to
trainee applications engineer.
It’s important to promote the industry to
the youth of today, says Robinson. “A lot of people don’t appreciate how vibrant the specialist
manufacturing sectors are in the UK. One of
the challenges, however, is that over the last
few years not a lot of young people are choosing manufacturing as a profession to go into so
we’ve become heavily involved with the
Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. As
a distributor there are few like us who are making this level of investment in young engineers
for the next generation.”
In the next 12 months, the managing director wants to continue developing the company’s presence not only in oil and gas but across
all its precision manufacturing activities including the aerospace and automotive sectors
while consistently delivering value to clients.
Its investment in training will continue with the
business expecting to recruit more sales engineers in 2016.
“Helix is very much invested in our customer’s success. If I’m not helping our customers operate more efficiently and productively then I won’t have a future either. That’s
what continues to drive us forward.”

www.helixtools.co.uk
Tel: [phone]

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