Surviving Tough Times
Total Engraving LTD Established For 30 Years
It’s no secret that we are in really trying times – understatement of the year. It is affecting us all in business and at home. It can be hard to stay positive whilst hearing all the doom and gloom we are subjected to everyday. It isn’t just new businesses that are feeling the pressure. The advantage that older businesses have is experience, having made it through previous tough spells and an existing loyal customer base.
Total Industrial Engraving Ltd have been established for 30 years now and were previously known as Michael Smith Engraving. Based in Leicester, we are well placed to dispatch orders up and down the country quickly.
Tanya’s been at the helm for 15 years now and one of the things she picked up quickly from her dad (Michael Smith) was, we are there to provide a service to our customers. She believes many businesses have forgotten that over time – and Covid.
Tanya says – So many of our customers need engraved labels to get them to site sign off on their projects. As ridiculous as it seems, £100 worth of labels could be holding up a £1 million project. A four (or worse) week lead-time just isn’t going to cut it. We get it, we know that the label text wasn’t confirmed by your client, or in the large list of other things the engineer needed to do, ordering labels never made it to the top of the list; or was simply forgotten.
We offer advice to our customers regularly on the best material for their project, usually incorporating the quickest option too, as we all know, time is money and if you have people on site with nothing to do, that money can add up quickly.
With speed in mind, we looked at and bought our first laser engraving machine in 2009 with a 610 x 610mm bed size, which was the largest available at the time. Switching people from Traffolyte labels wasn’t without its issues, therefore it’s something I still talk about now. I wrote a very interesting (if you are like me) blog about Traffolyte-https://totalindustrialengraving.co.uk/truth-about-traffolyte-material/. We started a long journey researching the best material out there – needing to balance cost, longevity, engrave/cut-out speed (later including carbon footprint and recyclability too).
The journey led us to CSI Online who share our values of working together to serve customers. They always help us out when we order last minute, and they have a large range of colours in stock which enables us to stock primarily our regular colours. They are on hand for advice on materials and application, which helps us to offer the service we aspire, for our customers.
For years we bought machinery from our initiallaser supplier, as the software was so easy to use, which made staff training more manageable. Their service had been getting worse for years and it was exacerbated by Covid. When we looked to add to a 4th laser engraving machine to our workshop, we knew we had to bite the bullet and make a switch, and CSI was the natural choice to supply the equipment.
I visited them in Bristol I was delighted to put faces to names, after many years working together; business is all about relationships that work. I used a Covid Recovery Fund grant through the East Midlands Chamber (EMC) to help us buy the machine and CSI were a great support through the process. – If you have used a grant before you’ll know it can get a little fraught at times.
The new machine has a larger engraving bed than our others at 920 x 610mm and the pro version of the Epilog achieves a much faster engraving speed. It has been a great option for us, as some jobs we would previously have mechanically engraved can now be laser engraved which reduces the lead time.
Engraving Everything Apart From Jewellery
Whilst we are called Total Industrial Engraving and supply a lot of Traffolytetype labels, we usually say we engrave everything apart from jewellery. We all love that no two days are the same. One minute you are making labels and the next engraving stainless steel or intricate brass for high end cosmetic displays. I recently remember pricing for a stainless steel legend plate and not really looking at the text properly. I saw the drawing said Aston Martin and thought it was cool. When we engraved it, I spotted the word ‘guns’ and it became a whole lot cooler.
We also were asked to engrave plaques for buoys, which I thought was unusual as I was thinking of the buoys you see by the coast – only to receive the drawings and find the stainless was 1000 x 700mm and therefore buoys for huge tankers instead. At the other end of the spectrumwe get fiddly discs that we engrave the CD logo into which become drawer handles for Dior displays – I’ve not managed to walk through Duty Free without looking for them since we started those, many years ago. I do love spotting our work in various locations around the country. Most memorably, the time I went into the Dunhill shop on the corner of Pall Mall to look at their floor as we’d engraved some copper floor tiles with famous quotes. I was the only woman in there and looked very out of place in my tourist attire. Most disappointingly we were involved in a Chanel Christmas window display at Harrods which I never saw in person as I couldn’t make it to London before it was taken down.
Quality along with speed is the heart of everything we do at TIE –we want to be seen as ‘The Industry Experts’ after all. Therefore, when I was introduced to Nigel Carr a few years ago through David Stanton, a local Quality Auditor, I knew they were the team I wanted in place for our journey to ISO certification. We had most of the processes is place, but some not documented at the time.
We weren’t worried about getting certified – having successful completed an ABB supplier audit some years before, but their support has been invaluable. You can really see that for them, it is about ensuring standards are high in manufacturing and not just providing that bit of paper that proves it – or not at the case may be.