This is the reply I received from Record Power.
Hi Neil,
You are quite right to pick up on this. Due to internal problems in the company that developed this site for us, which has lead to a huge delay in the second phase of the site, we are currently in the process of changing to a new development and hosting company. There are parts of this site that we can administer ourselves, but the static information is not part of that and very difficult for us to change at the moment for obvious reasons.
There is no intention to mislead. At the time of writing that, we manufactured about 70% of the machines (by sales volume) that we sold in Sheffield. If you look back in some of the threads in this forum you will see exhaustive discussions about all the changes simce then but in summary,
1) Last year the old parent company of Record Power took the decision to cease manufacturing the majority of its products in Sheffield and in the case of Record Power only four weeks notice of this was given. This clearly gave no time for a proper run down plan or build up of buffer stock causing some severe product availability problems last year. It also caused major problems for materials and sub-contract suppliers.
2) This decision was such a threat to the continued existence of Record Power and its dealer and end user base (product support etc) that a successful management buy out was launched as the parent company appeared to have no long term commitment to it.
3) The buy out included the purchase of all the intellectual property, designs, patterns, jigs, tools and fixtures of the products previously made in Sheffield and a major project was undertaken to get them back into circulation and ensure long term after sales support.
4) We are currently about 2/3rds of the way through this, which you can imagine is a huge and complicated task - and many of our 'Sheffield' products are now back in production. We have done this by sub-contracting their manufacture on an exclusive basis (they are made with our tooling and to our designs)to a number of manufacturing partners. Some still in the UK, some in Europe and some in the Far East depending on the core skills of the partner factories, the products and their volumes. In the case of the lathes, morticers and drill stands we have even shipped three of the large CNC machining centres to the partner factory so that they can still use the same designs, patterns jigs, tools, programs and even machines as we used in Sheffield. These are still exclusive Record Power products and we believe they still offer the the same benefits as they did before - our product philosophy has not changed, just the location of the factories. Indeed, in some cases the move has lowered the cost of production and this has been passed on to the consumer increasing value further.
5) In common with many manufacturers and most of our European competitors, we always had to supplement our own manufactured product with 'factored' or bought-in products made under our brand to fill gaps in the range that we could not make either due to manufacturing expertise (e.g. we had great skills in cast iron but no facility for plastic injection moulding)or cost price issues. We also had some exclusive agencies - such as Lurem, and we have always been up front about the origin of these products.
6) Select was a range of mainly Far Eastern (but not exclusively - some German and some Sheffield made) products aimed at the first time buyer and budget market. In our literature at the time we explained the origin of these and that this was in order to achieve price points we would not otherwise be able to reach. The intention was to use our skills to specify these products better than comparable products at the same prices and we believe we did this in most cases. However, because our roots have firmly been in the 'upgrade' product area we found that soemtimes the products were being bought as a lower priced alternative to our usual competitors in the mid and upper market and then they disappointed some users.
You will see from our activity over the past year and the merging with Startrite that our new products all fall into the bigger, heavier 'upgrade' market that we have always had our roots in and this is the way we intend to progress. We want to provide products that users enjoy using and give sound reliable performance for many years.
Sorry for such a long reply - but we are keen not to mislead and be open. This is why we have an open forum such as this and have to take the rough with the smooth. We believe that being open is the only way to build long term trust even when it can sometimes be painful.
We have had some massive projects over the last year - an MBO, moving factories, moving the business twice (once into a temporary home and now into our permanent home), divorcing ourselves from the parent company and therefore taking on all the functions that used to be shared, new computer systems etc. This has sometimes lead to service levels below those we want or intend to give in the future and long delays on some projects (such as the update and upgrade of the website - though this is now a priority).
However a large number of these projects are now complete or nearing completion, a large number of products that were not avaialble are now back in production. We are now in our permanent home and the new IT and systems are bedded in and through the rest of this year we are confident our customers will beign to see the improvements and commitment that will make us the customer focussed company we intend to be and hopefully make up for any frustration some may have experienced in the last 12 months.
Many thanks
Record Power
