Weatherite - a Black Country manufacturing success story
A company set up in a sun lounge in Pedmore over four decades ago is now employing 170 local people and has just secured its biggest-ever contract, worth a whopping £10 million.
Weatherite was born and bred in the Black Country, just like its founder, now chairman of the company, John Whitehouse who was born and brought up in a two-up two-down house in Old Hill.
Schooled at Old Hill Primary and Rowley Regis Grammar, he abandoned training as a quantity surveyor to become a trainee service engineer’s tool box carrier in 1963.
John, now 72, credits his nine years working for a Birmingham air conditioning firm as giving him the training that would later serve him so well. It also underlines his own commitment to training at Weatherite, which is currently looking for another three apprentices as part of its current recruitment drive.
Existing trainees are helping the company plug the skills gap that continues to plague companies in the engineering and manufacturing fields. Refrigeration is one specialist area that Weatherite has recruited for, with a pair of apprentices – both called Jack – are already making a good contribution to the business, says John Whitehouse. They are among 15 apprentices on the books at the firm at present.
One trainee who has flourished is Paul Griffiths, who joined the company the year after it was founded, in 1972, and is now technical director.
John credits Paul’s technical know-how with winning the major recent contract, supplying 66 specially designed air-conditioning units for a major computer data centre in Dublin.
“High powered servers like those in a data centre push out a lot of heat, around 10 kilowatts each, so our equipment is handling around 500kw in each server hall,” said Paul. “And it all had to be specifically designed to fit in a very restricted space. It was a pretty challenging job.”
Although air conditioning is still the company’s prime business, it has branched out into servicing and also creating shop fronts and security shutters – the latter a spin-off benefit from its long-term work with supermarket giant Tesco.
John Whitehouse says he and his team also learned a lot about management from working with Tesco. “They have always been very challenging people to work for but they taught us a lot about accepting change, grasping it with both hands.”
From that Pedmore sun lounge, the firm, employing just four people at the start, moved to a small unit in Lye before a series of ever-larger premises as the business grew. It now occupies a large site in Credenda Road, West Bromwich, and is currently drawing up plans to add around 35,000 sq ft of additional space to cope with its growing workload. It has also had to move its shop fronts arm Weatherite Aluminium Solutions, to another factory unit nearby.
John Whitehouse and his management team are currently looking at spending around £1 million on the factory, creating new space and making more room to work on projects such as the Dublin contract.
“Telecoms has always been a major part of the business – one of our biggest customers has been BT. Now the internet and the big data centres that support it could provide a big opportunity for us,” said John.
“We have been equipping telephone exchanges since 1980. The work comes and goes in waves, but I think there is something in the way of tsunami on the way at the moment.”
Weatherite’s manufacturing operations are now spread over three buildings on the site, ranging from the hi-tech electronics being installed for the data centre in Dublin to more traditional metal pressing work creating the boxes and housings for its range of air conditioning and cooling equipment.
This has meant continued investment in state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment over the years, such as the computer-controlled punch press, equipped with 48 tools in its tower, that is currently running for 18 or 20 hours a day, across two shifts, to cope with the current workload.
Other client names on equipment in various stages of completion on the factory floor include major restaurant chains and even famous racecourses. The company also assembles complete boiler rooms, containing water, heating and air conditioning control equipment, that can then be craned into position on building rooftops.
“Off-site manufacturing is a very attractive solution for some of our customers,” said Paul Griffiths. “It is much quicker than building it on the site; clients want it all boxed up and ready to’ plug and play’.”
While some of the equipment is built from scratch on the shop floor by Weatherites wide range of craftsmen and engineers, it also buys in specialist components from leading suppliers in France, Germany and Italy such as the complex brass tubing assemblies and the microprocessors being used on the Dublin project. While they are make overseas, manufacture is based on precise specifications from Paul Griffiths and his technical team.
That attention to detail, alongside high quality design, engineering and manufacturing work, has helped make Weatherite not just a Black Country success story but a nationally-reknowned business that is now making inroads into overseas markets.
