Top gear, low prices
January 1st 2008

A distribution deal with Turkey's largest gearbox manufacturer is paying dividend at the Richard Alan Group, according to Andy Batey. Brendan Coyne reports

Beginning life as a fabrication firm in Dewsbury, Richard Alan has developed into a mechanical and electrical engineering specialist, offering the design and build of turnkey projects, through to third party site maintenance, predominantly for chemical companies.

Today, its business divisions include: engineering; machine shop; gears, pumps and ancillaries; industrial cleaning machines; a scaffolding unit and its own recruitment arm. Under the stewardship of Robert Johnson, son of cofounder Richard, it remains a thriving, family-owned firm.

While Richard Alan Engineering remains its largest division, Andy Batey (pictured), who heads up the Gearbox and Pump business, says his division is currently seeing the group's fastest growth. The reason, he says, is a tie-up with Turkey's biggest gearbox supplier, Yilmaz Redktr.

Competitors may argue Turkey is hardly a bastion of metrology, warning customers that cheaper products are rarely cheerful in the long run. But Batey says the Yilmaz products stand up to scrutiny. "They're better than cheap and cheerful they're cheap and good. Every component, without exception, has come through our test and inspection process with flying colours." Owned by the Yilmaz family, the business operates out of one site in Istanbul. The basement houses the foundry, the ground floor basic machining, the first floor gears and assembly and the top floor is sales and marketing. "So some products actually come in as Iron ore and come out of the top floor as a complete gearbox: everything apart from the aluminium casting is done in house," says Batey. "It's a very short supply chain." Despite being ISO approved and accredited with the TUV, Batey says some customers are still suspicious of products without a bigger brand name. He points that although the products aren't better than their market leading counterparts, they are equal. "They're made on the same machines to the same standards and if you took the badge off, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. We're assembling them here, overseeing quality control, and we've had no issues to date.

We've priced it to undercut the large manufacturers, but it is not a lesser product." A bugbear, says Batey, is the way major manufacturers make their products in Eastern Europe or China and don't pass savings on to the customer. Yet they claim quality as the key selling point. Alongside the ISO/TUV accreditations, he says Yilmaz's ability to grind spiral bevels (which enables running two pinions with one wheel and, in terms of spares means only one gear is required as opposed to two) shows a level of technical expertise beyond many of Europe's other firms.

Yilmaz's flexibility is another big plus. "If you went to a large manufacturer and asked for a non-standard unit holes in a different place, a base plate or a different shaft to suit the application it would be a four week design process, more time consuming and far more expensive," says Batey. "Yilmaz, to its credit, just says 'Ok then' and makes it without slowing the delivery down. They can put any kind of shaft size and thread, in any combination: imperial; metric; or both. The flexibility is almost unbelievable." Exactly a year into the partnership, Batey says customers are realising the value to be had. Business is brisk, with the larger end of the market opening up. As the demand for energy efficiency continues, the pumps and drive division's next target area is worm gear helical bevels and helical worms which Yilmaz also makes.

"It makes the product even more competitive," says Batey, pointing to a large customer, Ciba Speciality Chemicals, which has appointed Richard Alan as its site specification and placed another 800,000 order with the company partially on the back of zero failures from the Yilmaz gear.

Although many firms in the sector see energy efficiency as a way to push prices up, Batey is refreshingly honest. "We're looking at it, but we're very much a 'me too' product in the sense that we can do everything that everyone else can. One thing that tends to work against us is ATEX ratings: everyone's asking for them and it reduces drive efficiency because of the limits on heat generation. The only way of dissipating heat and keeping generation lower is to go for more metal and bigger cases so one's working against the other.

However, he says very few customers appreciate that fact. "Many are at the stage where they want an energy efficient motor.

We say 'Yes, you could have one, but do you realise you have the most inefficient drive system you could possibly have? Swapping the motor's going to be negligible. Also, if you're running it for 50 minutes every hour, it's never going to reach an operating temperature, so all these energy curves and efficiencies are meaningless.' But people can overlook that in favour of the blurb. They pay more for an energy efficient drive and never realise any energy efficiency," Batey chides.

However, he says it's up to the industry to change misconceptions and missselling.

Whether or not change occurs remains to be seen. In the meantime with the inline products making inroads into the market, high hopes for the worms and helical worms side of the business, and inverters and electronics next in the pipeline Batey thinks his division of Richard Alan will remain the fastest growing if all Yilmaz products continue to prove their mettle.

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