FUCHS Lubricants invited PMF to its impressive facility in Hanley, Stoke-on- Trent, to showcase how its recent investment might have enabled the company to portray itself as ‘the number one independent lubricant manufacturer in the world’.
Upon arriving at FUCHS Lubricants’ manufacturing plant, we immediately witnessed the scope of the company’s investment in a headquarters in the UK. The modern main building was surrounded by an array of busy manufacturing areas that reflected FUCHS’ claim of running ‘the most modern lubricant production facility in the UK’. The decision to invest heavily in the plant was a decision made by the company’s leadership in Germany, and Andy Brown, Technical Manager, said on the matter, “We have the capacity to manufacture 120 million litres of lubricant per year on a single shift, and currently, we are operating at about three quarters of that. This generates a huge amount of stock, and we need the necessary systems in place to allow us to deal with these figures.”
Following a brief insight into the company’s history and offering from its Commercial Automotive Director, Russell Kenyon, we were given a tour around the facility. Our first port of call was the packaging factory, where we witnessed the full scale of FUCHS’ futuristic packaging capabilities. Not only were the company’s employees working on boxing up products and moving them onto pallets, there were also automated robotic arms that moved boxes onto pallets, and automated forklifts that roamed the aisles and carried pallets of lubricant around the facility. Andy, who was keen to point out the necessity for this modern approach, said, “Automation is a crucial part of manufacturing. The option of having this technology has meant we have been able to respond to an increase in customer demands.”
Next up was the Quality Control (QC) laboratory, which enables FUCHS to manufacture its products to approved OEM standards. The QC lab gives the company traceability of its products, so if the QC technicians “find even the most miniscule of flaws within a lubricant batch, they stop the production process until they find out what’s wrong,” said Andy. As QC is such an important aspect of FUCHS’ UK production, the company is expanding its laboratory to enable it to speed up its production capabilities. Andy stressed that this was because: “continuous supply is important to our customers; it’s their product, too.”
We were also treated to a view of the heartbeat of FUCHS’ production operation, the control room. From here, the amount of raw materials going into each batch is carefully monitored, as is the required ratio and the size of the final product. On this rigorous process, Andy commented, “FUCHS understands that every stage of the production process is crucial to the ‘bigger picture’. One of the greatest threats to independent lubricant manufacturers in the UK at the moment is the increasing variety of specifications coming through from the VMs. These days, it is very difficult for smaller outfits to keep up with these demands, with the one-size-fits-all solution no longer working.”
