BURY – UK technical textiles specialist Arville has completed a £1 million upgrade of its fabric coating plant in Bury, Lancashire, following a phased two-year project to overhaul the manufacturing site. The new investment follows on from Arville’s recent expansion to its weaving facility in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, as the company looks to streamline its operations using lean manufacturing principles and the most advanced textile manufacturing technology.
Arville, the UK technical textiles producer which produces high performance woven and coated textiles for the aerospace, defence, pharmaceutical, automotive, medical and food industries has upgraded its 15,000 sq. ft textile coating facility in Bury, Lancashire with a total £1 million investment.
The company says it has invested in new textile coating machinery including a dedicated area for compound mixing, secure chemical storage areas, ventilation systems, new coating heads, a high-speed vulcanising oven, inspection tables and high definition video cameras for in-line quality control.
“The overall result is a more versatile plant capable of both coating and combining a wide range of bespoke, high performance and high specification technical textiles, for various markets worldwide,” said the company.
“With a 60-year heritage, Arville has long been passionate about continued innovation in textiles manufacturing and more recently has undertaken an investment programme to maintain our ‘best in class’ status,” said Arville spokesperson Andy Smith. “We meticulously planned this extensive refurbishment to ensure we didn’t disrupt production for existing customers, and now, after a two year wait it’s great to have a ‘brand new’ state-of-the-art facility that will stand us in good stead for further growth.”
Fully integrated
The Bury factory was acquired by Arville in 2000, when the group purchased P&S Textiles in order to become a fully integrated business capable of manufacturing technical fabrics from end-to-end. “The layout of the production area has now been completely redesigned in line with lean manufacturing principles, to create a highly efficient workflow process from start to finish,” noted Arville.
This new investment follows the expansion of Arville’s weaving plant in Wetherby, West Yorkshire where it recently installed an extra stenter line to increase its finishing capacity to keep pace with the growing business.
Further technology investment is also in the pipeline.
“We’re part-way through the development of a new IT system which will create a powerful database for our technical textiles manufacturing,” noted Smith, “It will store every relevant detail about textile projects we undertake – from yarn specifications, weave constructions, inspection and testing reports and more. We’re also set to install a new laser cutting table at our fabrication unit in the coming months.
“These investments, funded wholly by Arville’s internal resources, show our commitment to keeping the company at the cutting edge of technical textiles production.”
Arville is a privately owned business employing a 100-strong team based across the group’s UK manufacturing sites.
