Record month and a new Technical Sales Engineer for Blum-Novotest

An East Staffordshire metrology specialist has pushed aside Brexit uncertainty to record its best ever month.

Blum-Novotest, which celebrated 18 years of trading in the UK in 2018, secured over £100,000 of orders for its ‘in-machine’ measuring technology that helps industry significantly reduce the time taken to measure cutting tools.

This represents a 60% increase on the same period twelve months ago, with the majority of the new contracts focusing on the firm’s DIGILOG family of touch probe systems.

The Burton-upon-Trent company is now looking to build on this positive start to the year by increasing its work with SME sub-contractors through the appointment of Paul Hodgkinson as dedicated Technical Sales Engineer for the UK.

David Mold, Managing Director, was delighted at the positive start to 2019: “With all the uncertainty around Brexit I was half expecting the first quarter to be extremely tough with investment decisions put on hold. We’ve actually seen the opposite.

“New orders have been placed by both the dealer network and also end user customers, with interest coming from clients involved in automotive, aerospace, medical and nuclear sectors. Whenever there is a need for repeatable quality, accuracy and quicker turnaround times then we have the answer.”

He continued: “I think it’s fair to say DIGILOG and its ability to measure ‘in-machine’ is proving extremely popular and we expect this range of probes to be our best sellers in 2019.”

Blum-Novotest has expanded its UK team with the appointment of a dedicated Technical Sales Engineer, who will be focused on establishing new relationships with SMEs.

Paul Hodgkinson brings with him an extensive network of contacts and more than 11 years’ experience working in industrial automation and the machine tool sectors.

He will be responsible for working with the sales team to better understand the requirements of sub contactors and the support they require to make the most of the Blum-Novotest technology.

“This is a very exciting time to be joining and I’m looking forward to helping the team increase the pipeline of possible sales across all of our target sectors,” explained Paul, who lists travelling as one of his hobbies.

“My job will be to get to know the pain points of SMEs and how we can use our solutions to help them improve manufacturing performance, speed and quality. There’s already a number of potential firms who have never used our products before that are keen to find out more.”

Blum-Novotest is one of the global leaders in production metrology, offering laser control, tool setting probes, workpiece probes, roughness gauges, bore gauges and DIGILOG touch probes.

Its UK operation originally started life in a small office in Lichfield, but as the firm’s reputation grew in aerospace and automotive, sales started to increase rapidly and a move to bespoke offices and a state-of-the-art demonstration room in Burton-upon-Trent followed in 2015.

Today, the company delivers its solutions to some of the world’s largest aerospace primes, car manufacturers and a host of CNC machine tool suppliers, including the Engineering Technology Group, Whitehouse Machine Tools and Yeovil Machine Tools.

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