You might not expect an industrial electric motor and gearbox specialist to be located a stones throw from the famous Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, but with close proximity to the motorway network, the Drives division of HAYLEY DEXIS helps keep Britain’s industry moving.
We asked Mark Jones, our Divisional Manager at HAYLEY DEXIS | Drives how his team works with the nationwide network of HAYLEY DEXIS branches to avert daily crises for industry operations, from bakeries producing bread to feed people across the country to keeping everyone’s toilets flushing.
CUSTOMERS WANT TO TALK TO PEOPLE
Mark starts by telling us that, “HAYLEY DEXIS | Drives specialises in specifying and supplying new motors, gearboxes, and inverters for the whole HAYLEY DEXIS network, supplying new against old. We’ve been operating for about 17 years as a Drives division, delivering products worth £24m+ on an annual basis. “Specialist divisions like ours are critically important for customers, as engineers on site want to talk to people with technical expertise. Where our competitors, to an extent, are moving towards catalogue selling, our type of product isn’t a catalogue sale. We do have a strong e-commerce platform to support our customers, but we’re a relationship-based business that leads with engineering technical expertise. For instance, when a customer calls regarding an old industrial gearbox that requires a new replacement, we would go to the site or work closely with the client to gather critical information, from dimensions to any application parameters we would need to be aware of.”
DOWNTIME IS STILL THE TOP ISSUE FOR CUSTOMERS
Mark explains that when it comes to downtime, our customers need the expertise of experienced staff, “Our customers generally require replacements for old and obsolete products from the 1960s and 1970s with various dimensions. Our technical experts will find a contemporary replacement or re-engineer a brand-new solution. I think downtime for customers is the biggest issue, almost regardless of industry. That’s why we pride ourselves on giving our customers the best solution quickly, which is often not one manufacturer: if it’s best to go with, for instance, an STM or a FLENDER, a WEG or an SEW, that’s what we’ll do, basically, a very unbiased point of view.”
IS THE FOOD INDUSTRY OUR BREAD AND BUTTER?
HAYLEY DEXIS supports the food industry as well as the host of other sectors that rely on electric motors and gearboxes to run their operations. Mark says, “For instance, a bread company has a £10,000 an hour downtime due to a gearbox that has gone down. The price of the gearbox is relative to the cost of a line being stopped. The customer needs to reach a reliable solution quickly, which makes our 24- hour team, expertise, locality, stock levels, and range vital. On the other end of the spectrum is the quarrying industry. There’s a new range of gearboxes we took on board six months ago, the HTC range, which is used in the quarry industry. We’ve got a complete range of those from 25mm up to 120mm, hollow bore on the shelf, varying ratios, 5, 13, 20 to one, and Japanese quality. “A motor or gearbox drives everything that moves in industry. So, if you jump on an escalator, there’s a motor gearbox at the bottom. The same is true of water treatment works: if you flush the toilet or turn a tap on, it will likely use the products we stock and supply to move water. If one of the major water companies calls us, it’s the same product sector on the same applications, so we can supply products on same-day delivery in most cases from here.”
ARE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS A FOCUS FOR HAYLEY DEXIS | DRIVES?
Mark agrees that relationships are still vital, “Yes, it’s critically important because I think people want to deal with people, and you can’t always get the product out of a catalogue. It’s a case of sitting down, getting things working, and, more importantly, going to the site because there are invariably issues. You go to the site, look at the job, and work it all out, and there are so many characteristics and things you’ve got to do. “We have 17 people working here, two external team members, one in the south and one in the north. There are eight technical specialists who purely concentrate on quoting applications, motors, gearboxes, and an admin team. We work very much as one team and I am very proud of the ethos that we’ve instilled here, as it certainly benefits the service that we offer to branches and their customers.”
If your business needs technical support when it comes to drive products, we’re here to help. Contact your local branch with any enquiries, and we will support them and you in providing the optimum solution quickly and effectively.