Testimonial J&D Pierce Contracts LTD.

Largest fully automated Voortman system

J&D Pierce Contracts Ltd. is a large structural steel fabricator based in Glengarnock, United Kingdom. Pierce focuses on large scale projects such as mega warehouses, football stadia and multi-storey carparks. The company currently employs approximately 350 employees with a turnover of 70 million pounds per year. Pierce invested in the largest European fully automated Voortman system. Due to the size of this immense project, the system was on forehand determined and designed based on real-time simulations.

Simulations used to determine optimal layout

Derek Pierce (CEO J&D Pierce): "We had many simulations on different concepts and different setups of the system. The real-time simulation was invaluable, to be fair. Without the simulation you were guessing how long it would take to drill a beam or cut a beam and flow through the automated buffer zones."

Exceeded expectations

Pierce was impressed with the completed installation: "The completed installation has to be honest exceeded my expectations. I did expect quit a few glitches with the total automation and the load balancing and there were very few problems which I was incredibly impressed with. The system is a large system and it has a tremendous amount of automation and they all worked almost perfectly first time which I was incredibly impressed with." The system significantly increased the productivity of Pierce: "We can do 200 tonnes per day without any issue at all. The facility is more than capable of doing way over 1.000 tonnes per week."

Pierce would recommend Voortman to any future customer for a number of reasons: "They were incredibly helpful. The install was as programmed as which we’d agreed. The support that we’ve had on the training had been excellent. The support we get from maintenance of your customer service is also very good and we often say we would recommend Voortman to many competitors."