Ashton Industrial Celebrates 25 Years

The new 33,000 ft2 Harlow facility of Ashton Industrial will see a few corks flying this month, when 25 years of designing, developing and installing bespoke high performance glass processing machinery for clients all over the world will be heartily toasted.

Latest seaming (arrissing) designs incorporate electronic interfacing with furnaces, cutting and sorting systems, laser marking of piece-specific information, fully automatic furnace bed batching and a multitude of other options. A far cry indeed from the first simple, robust machines built back in the 'eighties.

Yet some of those early designs are still in mass production today, and with very few real changes at that. The UNIX heavy duty manual diamond belt seamer (arrisser) is a perfect example; more than 650 of these are providing 24/7 performance in tempering plants across the planet, some of them almost as old as the company itself.

Steve Ashton, Managing Director: 'We are rightly very proud of what we do and how well we do it. And new processes for Lean Manufacturing, and Vendor Monitoring are being implemented to increase efficiency and output capacity in 2008 by an estimated 100%. New skills have been injected into production management, cost contol, Health and Safety and environmental management as befits the company's modern profile.

'We have a great team actively creating and building custom solutions for all aspects of flat glass processing from high volume to high tech. 95% of all we make is exported to glass processors all over the world. Recent prestigious projects have been completed in Japan, South Korea, South Africa, India, the USA and Canada.

'European exposure is bouyant, with three lines underway for Germany and another for Spain. The future is looking very positive indeed.

'Let's hear it for the team..... and here's to the next 25!'

Web: http://www.ashton-industrial.com