Oliver Group

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :29/10/2007 11:29:46

High quality valves for a high pressure industry

Written by Alison Withers & Produced by Sean Quantrill

General Manager Colm Kane on the adaptability that has allowed Oliver Group to become one of the world’s leading valve manufacturers

The Oliver Group, established more than 25 years ago, produces high quality valves capable of withstanding extreme pressure and temperatures. It is now one of the world’s leading manufacturers of valves, supplying most of the major players in the petrochemical, oil and gas industry for both topside and undersea use in more than 70 countries across the world.

The group has three factories/divisions, including Oliver Valves, which specializes in SSV and OSSV needle and bore valves for severe and critically severe service applications – designed to withstand pressures of 6000-10,000 psi and temperatures of 650ºC. The other two divisions are Oliver Valvetek and Oliver Twin Safe. Each of the three divisions has its own factory, the most recent of which is a 17,000 square ft unit purchased last year. All are on the same industrial site in Knutsford, Cheshire, near Manchester airport. Since August 2004 the group has also had a five-year lease on a factory in Chennai, India, which assembles and tests hard valves, supplying around 3,000 repetitive hard valves a month to Oliver Valves in the UK.

Meteoric progress

Colm Kane, 48, has been general manager of Oliver Group since early 2006. He has worked for the company for four years, joining as their supply manager. He has a background as a manufacturing engineer plus a post graduate qualification in business management following a three year course in business school.

His role as general manager for the three divisions involves overseeing the progress of each order received via the sales team right through to the customer. The group has been expanding rapidly and this has meant significant investment in extra staff; the sales team has been extended to 14 people in the group’s own offices around the world, covering all five continents. It has also added to senior management, with the recent recruitment of a general manager for the Twin Safe division, now relocated into the recently-purchased factory. It is currently recruiting a sales director for the board. The design team has also been extended with an additional engineering director and three new engineering managers. “A second senior management team for the three companies looks after the front end, orders, engineering and materials availability,” Kane explains.

The company recently bought a 12 inch bore for the new Twin Safe factory, increasing its manufacturing capability. The extremely high quality specifications needed for all the valves mean production cannot be automated. Customers have to be confident there will be no leakage and, says Colm Kane: “There can be no room for error.

“You have to fit them together by hand, you can feel things the machinery can’t. We don’t use automated processes. We’ve developed our own processes and our own hardware to assemble valves on and to hold them in place. The hardware enables the factories to get the valves and inside heavy components in place and with out own lifting equipment which drops the parts in very slowly.”

The factory is organized into separate product cells based on the size of the valves and uses a lot of the principles of the Kaizen systems, but adapted for Oliver’s particular purposes. The cell structure helps eliminate some of the usual movement of parts back and forth through various parts of manufacturing processes. “We have created a flow through of materials into the product cells to minimize product movement. Wasted time and effort is at an absolute minimum with the principles adopted into the factory cell layout.”

The Group uses an IT system ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for planning total requirements from people through activities to materials to be bought. Recruitment of enough staff is not easy for a fast-growing company in an area like Cheshire, which has no tradition of substantial heavy industry. The work force has doubled in the last two years and a year ago the Group set up its own apprentice scheme in collaboration with Mid-Cheshire College, Northwich, and Stockport College, who supplied five apprentices. Says Colm Kane: “One young lad has progressed so fast that he is now part of the CAD and design team.”

Staff turnover on the shop floor is higher than they would like at 8-10 percent a year, and he freely admits engineering work and standing all day is not to everyone’s taste, so the Group works hard to provide incentives for people to stay. New products and processes are developed through a “classroom-type” environment for a couple of hours a time followed by a couple of hours on the shop floor. There are also half-day sessions with individuals on specific topics so everyone understands the whole process and all the problems that could occur.

There are suggestion boxes and boards around the factories, and once a suggestion is implemented the employee who has proposed it gets a bonus, - typically £50 to £100 - reflecting the resulting time and cost saving. More than 50 percent of the staff started their working life on the shop floor and staff turnover is therefore very low.

Ambitious growth plans

Oliver Group has already exhibited in several countries this year including Malaysia, China and Scotland, and in August won a significant order worth? from Aramco Oil Company. The Group expects turnover to double in the next two years.

Since the company is currently producing around 15,000 valves a month in Oliver Valves and 3-5000 each in the other two factories, space is already at a premium. With a target of 30-40 percent growth for the next year, they are already on the hunt for another factory, hopefully on the same site in Knutsford.

The Group is exploring the possibility of opening a second factory in South India at Koimbatore, which will be linked to the much bigger valves produced by Twin Safe. Koimbatore would handle forging and casting, a tradition in the area, and the eventual plan will be to manufacture and test on the two sites in India, using its tradition of painstaking attention to detail and the locally renowned expertise, then sell the products through a new Indian sales division into the Indian domestic market. It’s a sensible strategy for a company whose entire output is for export.

Colm Kane was given the task of finding premises and recruiting staff for the smaller Chennai machine shop in just over a month with the instruction “don’t come back until it’s sorted”. This was a task that concentrated his mind – especially given that he was due to go on holiday the day after his planned return!

He achieved his target and the unit, which started with six employees has already grown to 26. Mindful of future recruitment needs, he is already keeping an eye out for likely candidates in the UK: “Whenever I’m interviewing anybody, even if they’re not suitable for the particular position, if they have qualities suitable for elsewhere I’m willing to take them on with a view to expansion simply to get them on board and put them into the culture.”

The most recently-developed new product is a cryogenic valve capable of withstanding temperatures as low as minus 196ºC. “There are many new markets out there that are going to be explored in the coming years where a plastic or rubber seal has to be able to still seal under extreme cold,” Kane says. The new valve has already been independently tested and verified as capable of meeting this need, putting the group in a position to start manufacture and supply as demand increases.