New purpose-built plant for SEW Eurodrive

Gearbox production, service and storage facility designed as welcoming ‘open house’ for customers

SEW Eurodrive have completed a move to a large, new, purpose-built plant in Normanton, West Yorkshire, just a few miles from their old site.

The impressive, high-tech new building is designed not just for production, service and storage, but as a welcoming ‘open house’ for customers, featuring a permanent working exhibition demonstrating all of the company’s products, along with a range of modern training and meeting rooms to cater for all requirements.

Mark Holmes, SEW Eurodrive’s managing director, who headed up the management team that oversaw the move, said: ‘We’re actively encouraging customers to come and see us here and to use our facilities. A whole section of the building was designed with customers in mind so that they can see our products on show in a dedicated demonstration area, and make use of our training facilities and meeting rooms.’

The new 10,000 square metre plant allows the lean assembly of standard product in a controlled environment with increased capacity of about 50% over the previous site, while a vast storage area with more than £2.8 million in computer controlled stock will allow SEW Eurodrive to despatch customer orders quickly and efficiently.

The move to the new plant was driven in part by a planned expansion of the gearbox service and repair division. With the extra space, SEW Eurodrive have installed two 10-tonne gantry cranes and can now offer repairs to bigger industrial gearboxes (from any manufacturer) of up to 20 tonnes in weight.

Additionally, the company has invested in a 300-tonne press which has the capability to press gears 2.5m in diameter with shafts of up to 10m long.

Karl Rigg, SEW Eurodrive’s UK service manager, said: ‘Our reputation has been built on our ability to repair gearboxes cost-effectively, reliably and quickly. We don’t want a customer's gearbox in our plant for any longer than necessary and every day there will be gearboxes coming in and going back out again having been repaired on the same day.

‘We’ve now got the capability to easily provide a service to customers with extremely large gearboxes in sectors such as mineral extraction and aggregates. The ability to assemble and load test large industrial drive packages is also a big advantage in the new facility.’