Pendle company completes first critical order of ventilators for NHS

Bright Engineering, a manufacturing company based on Lomeshaye Industrial Estate, was approached early April to set up production on a range of ventilator components required over a three week period. The contract involved recruiting extra staff and ramping up production to run day and night, including weekends.

The government made the call to UK manufacturers in March to upscale and repurpose their factories as other sectors including Aerospace were scaling down due to the Covid pandemic.

Bright Engineering was tasked by its customer Altec CNC to produce around ten different part numbers, some of them complex in nature, and over a three week period ramped up its production activity to deliver nearly ten thousand parts for assembly into the Helix Ventilator programme.

Managing Director Jon Hoyle said: “Bright’s workforce were keen to get involved with this project, given the concerning nature of the pandemic. The seriousness of the disease really made us focus on achieving the demanding targets set by our customer and there was no real room for failure.

"Due to the nature of the project, our staff were designated key workers and the commitment and effort they showed to complete the task made us all very proud. Some of our colleagues have friends or family involved in the NHS, and also in the treatment of Covid, so it came fairly close to home as to what this project meant to the country."

The contract involved daily deliveries to keep the end user in full production and in total almost 15 tons of raw material were required, which Bright collected on a daily basis. Raw material was flown in specially from Germany to meet the demanding schedule, such was the demand.

Altec CNC MD, Paul Lackenby said about Bright: “A big and sincere thank you to Jon and the team at Bright Engineering for supporting me and my staff on what is for probably all of us involved, both engineers and support staff, the most important and time challenging project we will all ever work on in our lifetime. UK manufacturing at its best."

Bright employs 25 people and its more usual sources of work come from aero engines, aircraft seating, the food manufacturing sector and oil and gas.

Since completing the UK project the firm has received another order for a different set of ventilator components destined for a European project with deliveries due to take place over the month of May with a similar challenging daily schedule.