Member Article

Grundfos complete biggest-ever order

WORKERS at Sunderland pump manufacturer Grundfos have just won a race against time to complete their biggest ever order.

Staff at the company’s Castletown plant designed and built a huge order for a giant technology company.

“The order was for a new datacentre being built near Slough. We were asked to provide the cooling pumping system for the plant. Our solution was a package we designed and built here and involved six main pumps and four auxiliary pump systems. The tremendous heat generated in these huge datacentres needs to be managed around the clock, so it’s a vital role we’re fulfilling,” explained John Austin, Engineering and Quality Manager at Grundfos. Grundfos were given only nine weeks in which to complete the contract, but a team of 20 worked around the clock in order to finish the project that should normally take 16 weeks. The 14m by 4m package was driven down to Slough last week.

“I’m very proud of our team who worked so hard to get the order finished in such a short time – people were working 12-hour days and weekends to beat the deadline. I’m also grateful to our suppliers, including Crane Express, GK Fabrications and BSS Newcastle, who helped us massively,” said John.

“It’s the biggest order we’ve completed and in a real growth area for us. We’re already working on another big order for another datacentre and talking to prospective customers about other Engineered to Order (ETO) datacentre contracts. We’ve completed work on smaller datacentres in the past, but nothing of the scale we’re looking at now.

“The amount of data being used globally is increasingly dramatically – people are hungry for data so there will more and more datacentres which will get bigger and bigger, and Grundfos is tapping into this growing market,” John added.

The datacentre orders have helped deliver significant increases in Grundfos’s important ETO sector. Last year, there was an 86 per cent increase in their ETO contracts; the year before had seen a 105 per cent increase. “Our ETO performance has gone from strength to strength and we think the growth is sustainable. We’ve taken on more engineers and shopfloor staff to cope with demand. Earlier this year we shipped our 500th ETO project – it is a hugely important area for us now,” said John.

Mark Lister, Plant Director at Grundfos, added: “We have the experience, skills and knowledge within our Castletown plant to produce ETO packages for a wide range of customers. The datacentre orders are good examples of what we can produce here and it’s a credit to our workforce that we can design, engineer and manufacture such packages.” Grundfos, a Danish company, is the world’s leading pump manufacturer and employs more than 18,000 people globally. It opened a Wearside plant in 1973 and now employs nearly 150 people at its Castletown site.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Grundfos .