How RS Industria has helped an iconic bike brand improve performance

As the UK’s largest bike manufacturer, Brompton has sold more than one million of its iconic folding cycles since its inception in 1975. Now a global phenomenon - and the ultimate in sustainable transport solutions - Brompton was originally founded by engineer Andrew Ritchie as an easy way to navigate busy cities.

Andrew honed the hand-build of his innovative 3-part folding bike over the next few decades, growing the business from its first home in a small London workshop into the world-famous manufacturer it is today.

The bike, which simply folds down into a compact package for easy transportation, has evolved into multiple lines including lightweight and electric motor designs, winning awards and a global customer base along the way. Sold through 1500 dealers and 15 ‘Brompton Junction’ stores across Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America, Brompton employs an 800-strong global workforce.

The heart of the business and its manufacturing takes place at its West London base of Greenford and a welding site in Sheffield, where Brompton manufactures around 100,000 bikes a year.

Delivering innovation and insight

It’s here Brompton’s high-quality and unique, easy-to-operate design is built using more than 1200 parts in the final assembly, with the steel frame joined by hand in a process called brazing.

To continue to achieve its goals and meet increasing worldwide demand, Brompton has been leveraging its partnership with like-minded supplier RS to deliver innovation across its operations.

Repeat failures of a machine critical to its plant were causing major issues for the Brompton engineering team. Essential to the manufacture of its bikes, the underperformance of the CNC machine was costing valuable time through delayed productivity. To add to the team’s frustration, a lack of visibility into when these failures were likely to occur meant that downtime to fix the problem was happening all too frequently.

RS Industria is a modular system powered by an innovative cloud-based technology that collects and analyses data from legacy and new assets in real-time. The resulting insight can be used to monitor the condition of assets, predict failures and inform future maintenance planning while improving uptime, reliability, and operational efficiencies.

By implementing RS Industria, Brompton was immediately able to gain greater visibility while being given the tools to continually monitor the asset’s performance. The resulting analytics have enabled the engineering team to optimise their trial and test processes, save cycle time and speed up tooling design.

Valuable data is displayed on dashboards, allowing Brompton to monitor the asset closely for signs of wear or failure before it stops the line. Engineers are also alerted to any potential issues by text message, turning data into action.

Game-changing technology

For Brompton Manufacturing Engineer, Malcolm Millar, it’s been a game-changer, removing the need to test a high volume of parts and freeing up engineers’ time that could be better spent on other activities.

Simple, fast, and affordable, the solution was warmly received by Brompton and has since been successfully deployed to monitor energy consumption at the Greenford site, resulting in over £24,000 of savings in the first year.

This equates to more than 100,000 kWh energy saving per year or CO2 emissions savings of circa 4 tonnes.

Elsewhere RS Industria is being used to improve performance and reliability and provide transparency to assets including the cycle frame paint line, which has led to a change in start-up and lubrication procedures and positively impacted the reliability of the plant.

Phil Dewson, Head of Maintenance & Facilities at Brompton Bicycles says: “RS Industria is manufacturing-focused and speaks the same language as us: reliability, automation, and problem solving…when we first met them, we knew these were some people we could really work with.”

To find out how we can add value to your operations, contact us today.