With 2016 coming to an end, below is a short review of what happened at TQC during the year.
TQC has increased their workforce over the past few months and we welcome a number of new faces. Victor Szolin has joined as a Project Manager, Anton Bell and David Richardson are new Mechanical Design Engineers and Brent Trueman has joined the electrical depart as a Technician. These new employees have successfully integrated and will allow TQC to continue to meet project commitments over the coming years.
TQC have taken part in two exhibitions during the year. The Made in the Midlands events in Wolverhampton and Derby showcased manufacturing in the Midlands region and TQC made some very good contacts during the events both at supplier and customer levels.For more information on MIM, please visit their website at madeinthemidlands.com
During 2016, TQC have been working on a project supported by an Innovate UK grant. The project is to develope a high precision leak test instrument specifically to test small volume parts. This work will continue into the first quarter of 2017 when we will announce results of the project and more information on the leak test unit. For more information on Innovate UK please click here.
The PRIME project that was previously announced here, was completed in 2016. PRIME is the acronym for Plug and pRoduce Intelligent Multi-agent Environment based on standard technology. It was an EU FP7 funded project involving ten European partners. TQC's main role was implementation of a demonstrator with the Precision Manufacturing Centre at Nottingham University. The demonstrator shows how software agents were able to manage and adapt a product assembly system when tools and testing components were added and removed. The advantage of this is a significant reduction in re-configuration effort and downtime. For more information of this project see www.prime-eu.com/.
Factory improvements have continued to be progressed with the Sales office refurbished with new flooring and a refreshing lick of paint. The front approach of the TQC building has been improved by removal of the old entrance and a more welcoming entrance for visitors will be completed by the end of the spring.
The TQC IT system has been upgraded so all users are now running Windows 10. The upgrade required several PC systems to be replaced and a new server. TQC now fully utilise the latest Office suite and our SolidWorks 3D CAD system is now the 2016 version.