RS CLARE COMPLETES £1.6M NEW TECHNICAL CENTRE INNOVATION HUB

The completion of the £1.6m Technical Centre will help RS Clare continue its commitment to innovation through enhanced testing and R&D capacity.

The company has always sought to explore new ways of improving services and products, successfully reinventing its business model many times over the years to respond to the changing needs of customers and the wider market. This new facility will enable us to continue furthering these ambitions on a larger scale thanks to increased capacity and improved research facilities.

Here’s how the centre will help enhance our business, products, and most importantly our solutions for our customers.

A dynamic new working environment

The facility is purpose built to enable more testing and innovation. The increased capacity of the new centre is specifically designed for R&D, enabling us to adopt a range of exciting new testing processes. This includes working with more heavy duty testing equipment to replicate product behaviour in real-world applications. This new function will bridge the gap between laboratory testing and field performance to provide more testing data and give customers greater confidence in our new product developments.

In addition to the application test laboratory, the new technical centre offers twice as much capacity as the previous facility and can accommodate twice as many staff. This expansion in technical capability underlines RS Clare’s ambitious plans for future growth.

More efficient workflow for Quality Control and R&D teams

The space is specifically set up so staff from both the Quality Control and R&D teams can access shared machinery and resources in a dedicated area, then return to work in their customised spaces. This helps us focus on enhancing productivity and efficiency through streamlining workflow.

RS Clare can now separate different testing processes such as analytical instruments from our heavy duty mechanical testing machinery. This uncoupling of processes will mean more testing equipment can run simultaneously to increase testing output. The larger size of these spaces reflects the anticipated expansion of our future capacity.

Sustainable space

A new building management system has been installed to improve how the centre uses energy. Controlled by two computers, a heat recovery system demonstrates RS Clare’s commitment to sustainability and is in place to reduce emissions and recycle heat. The system is typically capable of recovering the equivalent energy of 33 kettles boiling (67KW) when running.

Faster journey from product concept to market launch

It also enables the new product development process to be expedited. Adding an interim in-house application testing phase means the performance of a new product can be validated more effectively, resulting in more thorough testing and more performance data to confidently launch the product into the market. This faster commercialisation of new products enables us to service our customers’ needs more quickly and effectively, ensuring they receive innovative products sooner to help extend the life of their assets and ultimately reduce operational costs.

Targeted solutions for global markets

As a company with ambitions to continue expanding across the globe, the facility will provide more scope to test for different climates. So to find out if a product will work within the hot, dry climate of the Middle East, a more tropical, humid working environment such as in South East Asia or in colder countries including Norway or Canada.

The R&D team will be able to imitate these different weather conditions onsite. While these tests can currently be performed in external labs, bringing them in-house will speed up the development time and ensure new products are optimised for the extreme climates our customers operate in.

Greater innovation around testing methodologies

Rather than relying solely on industry standard methods, the facility will enable RS Clare to complement these by developing our own enhanced testing methods. This means we can expand testing capability to ensure it adds greater value for our customers by solving specific issues they may have experienced in the field.

New state-of-the-art centre to shape Liverpool’s industrial future

The facility is not only another landmark achievement for RS Clare and a positive development for our customers, but means we are also able to continue attracting some of the best and brightest minds in our industry to our Liverpool base. A city steeped in culture and heritage, our head office is situated between two of six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Liverpool, a place we’ve held since 1770. Liverpool’s history as a globally recognised industrial leader plays an integral part in the RS Clare story and we hope our new facility will continue to further the city’s world-beating reputation industry and innovation on a global scale.

With RS Clare recently enjoying significant growth, the completion of the new Technical Centre marks another chapter in our aims to grow and deliver market-leading products and solutions.