Xtrac is the World’s leading supplier of high-performance transmissions for top level professional Motorsport and High-Performance Automotive applications. Headquartered in Thatcham, Berkshire and with additional operations in the USA, Xtrac designs, manufactures and assembles all of its transmissions in-house using the very latest design and analysis tools, state of the art machine tools, and lot least first-class inspection equipment. To help foster enduring, advantageous relationships businesses are increasingly looking to reduce the amounts of vendors they deal with, and when possible seeking to establishing a single source of supply. Along with considering the standard of the products being provided, potential customers are also increasingly assessing the levels of service offered by prospective suppliers.
Complementing its high-quality metrology products, Mitutoyo is also able to provide first-class calibration, training, IT support and sub-contract measurement services and bespoke measurement solutions. The all-embracing, single-source nature of Mitutoyo UK’s products and services has enabled the business to form close relationships with its large UK customer base. Xtrac makes use of Mitutoyo’s wide range of additional services, in particular the company’s sub-contract measurement services.
Xtrac Inspection Manager, Neil Warwick explained. “To guarantee the delivery of premium quality products, we perform inspection routines with the use of a wide range of advanced Mitutoyo inspection aids. For instance, we use several highly precise Mitutoyo Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs) in our quality department. Given the demanding nature of many of our customers, we are often challenged with extremely short lead-times. In addition to using state-of-the-art machine tools that help to speed up our manufacturing output, our rapid, yet extremely accurate Mitutoyo CMMs enable us to fast-track component throughput in our busy quality department.”
“When our larger workpieces occasionally exceed the physical capacity of our metrology equipment, as Mitutoyo have access to several extremely large-capacity, high-accuracy CMMs and other high-precision inspection equipment, we occasionally take advantage of the company’s sub-contract Measurement Services. In addition to guaranteeing the challenging levels of precision that we require, it helps that when returned to use, our Mitutoyo inspected components are accompanied with valid certification that is traceable to recognised standards.”
“As Mitutoyo Measurement Services employ skilled metrologists technical communication is very straight forward and given the demands of our customers and their often short lead-times, our subcontract measuring work is always turned around very quickly.”
“As our current Mitutoyo CMMs and other measuring tools have the capacity to accommodate 99% of the components that we are required to inspect, it would not be cost-effective to invest in larger equipment with capacities that would rarely be needed, therefore we regard Mitutoyo’s subcontract measuring service as an ideal inspection back-up.”
“A perfect example of our use of Mitutoyo’s Measurement service was when we were recently faced with having to measure a small number of components that were beyond the physical capacity of our in-house CMM’s. To enable our subcontract measurement task to be performed as quickly as possible, in advance of the first component being dispatched we provided the relevant CAD model and associated drawings to Mitutoyo to enable CMM programming to be completed. As on previous occasions, the entire operation was seamless, soon after they were shipped, all of the fully inspected and certified components arrived back with us extremely quickly and in accordance with our schedule.”
If you would like to take advantage of subcontract measurement services from Mitutoyo details can be found at www.mitutoyo-subcon.co.uk