TechArchive

Original article date: February 1999

They’re offering us wider ranges of compatible components, cheaper prices, faster delivery, and better support too. David Norris talks to the framework based system suppliers

Only a few years ago it took us just hours, not days, to contact all the UK suppliers of aluminium framework systems for machine building when it came to do this annual survey. It’s a backhanded compliment to the more established players that they got the message over about the advantages of their products so well, that the market took off and they now have so many competitors.

If you have all the catalogues on your desk (as I do), it’s obvious that all suppliers’ offerings are not equal. At one extreme are the suppliers who concentrate on a few basic extrusions and connectors (primarily aimed at users who just want to knock up workbenches and machine guards); at the other extreme are the suppliers whose enormous ranges of profiles, accessories and matching engineering components require catalogues of several hundred pages.

The big names in the market have traditionally been Item (sold here through Machine Building Systems) and Bosch, and few suppliers seem to be arguing that anything’s changed. Both have very big ranges of profiles and accessories, with hundreds of useful components which allow the complete hardware side of an automation system to be built from kit format without any engineering compromise.

Having so much competition, it’s surprising that the big names have continued to grow, but the fact is that the overall market is growing just as fast, as more and more machine builders realise the advantages there are to be had in building production rigs from kit components. And most of the suppliers are trying hard to ensure that however wide their product range, they offer good design advice and technical resources, so things are certainly heading in the right direction for customers. Jeff Blackman of Bosch actually says that “the new players in the market have brought new approaches to the shape and thickness of extrusions, and made the existing suppliers work harder to maintain their market positions”.

Response after response from suppliers this year went on and on about having to provide ‘complete solutions’ to ‘engineering problems’. Leaving aside for a minute the implication that their customers have ‘problems’ in building machines, what we think this Dilbertesque marketing waffle means is that if the suppliers offer to provide all the parts for a machine, and probably build it too, the customers are more likely to give them the order. Obviously there’s substantial (and perhaps increasing) demand for the suppliers to be system builders too, but it seems that in the world of marketing, being successful at catalogue component sales isn’t considered as cool as doing the engineering.

Of course, of greater importance to most customers than ‘complete solutions’ is ‘lower prices’. Hepco came into the market last year with a small range which it said would undercut existing competitors noticeably, and Robin Hill from the company says that “until recently the major players in terms of market share had life a little too comfortable”.

Few suppliers want to talk about the delicate subject of prices without prompting, but Nigel Clarke of Boldman, the Paletti system supplier, certainly does. He says: “There’s a price war going on, with several companies reducing their prices several times recently. In fact, one company reduced its prices four times in the last twelve months. It makes you think about the overcharging which must have taken place prior to the recent influx of profile systems.” Despite the changes, Tony Hollinshead of Ace Assembly Systems says that “prices remain unattractively high” and he is aiming to “break this trend”. And Philip Brown of Phoenix Mecano points out that “there has been no price increase since 1995″.

If the prices are dropping, it’s hard to see how the support can improve, but the suppliers genuinely believe it’s on that aspect that customer choices are made, and they should know. And the effort going into customer support is certainly impressive. The catalogues are often excellent. Almost everyone now provides CAD files of their parts, and some suppliers even have complete CAD systems available for designing rigs using their components. Most are developing web sites too, although in the main these aren’t being treated as much more than advertisements for the product ranges. As Roy Fraser of Bett Sistemi says: “More and more customers want to deal with fewer and fewer suppliers, and the suppliers they are dealing with, they want more and more from.”

However, Michael Etherington of Alusett suggests that despite the talk, not all the suppliers genuinely have the support in place. He says: “There are many new distributors of extrusions not offering design and mechanical engineering support.” And Gary Livingstone of Time & Precision agrees: “Others have entered the market without the design skills or engineering support offered by established suppliers.”

Apart from the convenience of being able to modify rigs after you’ve built them (or as you build them), another appeal of aluminium framework systems is the looks and the acceptance. A few years ago this might not have been the case – a welded steel structure would have been considered ‘proper engineering’. But now they’re accepted, the cleaner, more modern look is a positive advantage. In simple machine guard applications, David Lynes of Standex has certainly noticed “an increase in acceptance over the more traditional fabriacted guards”. And Nigel Williams of Applied Automation says that more companies want “something that is not only functional but looks right; we have always had curved profiles, and profiles with slot-free faces in our range”.

Faster deliveries is not something which many suppliers highlight, perhaps surprisingly, although Alison Tyler of Parker Digiplan is an exception, stating quite categorically that “customers are requiring shorter deliveries”. And Anders Larsson of Flexlink also thinks this is a priority: the company has ensured quick delivery from its central warehouse and local system builders, and “RS Components can be a very important factor, and can solve a lot of our quick delivery requirements”.

As to the way the market is heading, Mark Simpson of Mannesmann Rexroth, one of the newer suppliers around (with its Alustar system), says that “the market may become saturated with suppliers due to the attractive expected growth levels, and consequently margins should be reduced to a competitive minimum. This may result in lower numbers of suppliers satisfying the market expectations, both in the short and long term”. Systems such as Alustar and Hepco’s Kijeon are a support to much larger businesses in linear motion at their respective suppliers, so should have a good future.

It’s likely that most of the current suppliers will be around for a while at least, which is lucky, as most of their systems are incompatible (with the exception of Paletti’s deliberate attempt to be ‘compatible’ with Item), so all users run the risk of getting locked into their supplier. If you’re worried about presence, quiz your suppliers hard about their stockholdings. And if you come across a name you’ve never heard of offering you a few cheap extrusions, consider whether you agree with the thoughts of Stuart Mitchell of Machine Building Systems (who always seems to get the last word in): “Say you want to buy your nephew a constructive present for his birthday. Are you going to buy him Lego, or some no-name system with four or five bricks in the range, for which you’ll then have to get your own windows and doors and a hundred other pieces if he’s to build anything with it?”

February 1999