HI-TECH AUTOMATION - Key Persons
I have been involved in Robotics since 1978 when the first Hydraulic robots were introduced into car plants such as "Elsmere port" and "Ford Dagenham". I moved into application sales at "Cincinnati Milacron" before joining "CLS" in 1989 to focus on selling "Robotic solution" into the plastics sector. I could see the rapid take-up of "Press tending" solutions and saw an opportunity to start my own company in 1996.
I had been working with my colleague and co-founder of Hi-Tech Ricky Thompson for the previous 8 years and felt strongly that a UK based automation manufacturer with a strong background in "Cartesian" and "Six axis" anthropomorphic robots could deliver solutions generally only available from German suppliers that dominated the Plastics Industry.
Our focused industry knowledge, in-house design and manufacturing combined with local support is what the market needed and this philosophy has proven to be successful. I have been lucky enough along the way to have been helped and given opportunities to develop our business further, I had the pleasure of working with an application engineer call Chris Sumner at "Cincinnati Milacron" some thirty years ago, Chris eventually became Managing Director / Vice President at FANUC Robotics UK Ltd and convinced me to work with Fanuc as part of their newly established "Partner Programme".
My career started in 1981 working with CNC machinery at the "Royal Ordinance Factory in Leeds" and then into the "big wild world" with Cincinnati Milacron, Kingsbury Road, Birmingham as a product specialist in 5 axis special purpose machine tools.
This then led to an involvement with Industrial Robots at Cincinnati as the control systems shared some common control architecture. It was at this time that I first worked with Gary Probert on a number of applications that he had sold to end customers.
Working in many different application areas of CNC machine tools and robotics from the infancy of laser cutting, water jet profiling, machine tending and metal folding gave me in-depth application knowledge of manufacturing techniques.
In 1992 I joined Gary Probert working on robotic solutions in the plastics sector, the industry was very labour intensive and the take-up of Cartesian robots was starting to increase. It became almost immediately apparent that this sector was dominated by overseas suppliers selling out of boxes or from catalogues.