Launched in 2004 Machfab has grown expertise in all aspects of CNC and conventional machining, steel fabrication and sheet metal services.
Led by Ian Hazlehurst, the business has grown to eight staff and a turnover of around £500,000, but workloads were starting to diminish.
"We could see our competition was taking work from us,” Ian explained. “Jobs that took us an hour were taking rivals minutes. We were also not very flexible and unable to take on any volume work because conventional machining was too manual, we were using older versions of CAD software, and there was no connectivity within the business.”
Machfab had attempted to speed up production by outsourcing programming to third party suppliers, but that ate into profits.
“Technology was evolving,” Ian said. “We had fallen behind. We had to catch up. We were too busy getting the job done on the equipment that we had to look up and see what was happening around the industry. We knew we had to adapt.”