"Bulgin is dedicated to enhancing its position as a market leading quality assured source for power, protection and environmentally sealed products"
Introduction
Bulgin is one of the electronics industry's longest-running success stories. After more than 80 years trading, the Bulgin name is familiar and trusted worldwide. Many of our components have gained the status of industry standards. You don't achieve that kind of record by standing still - least of all today, when new developments and challenges appear in the blink of an eye. Bulgin aims to stay ahead by continuing to offer new products in response to market needs.
Our major customers, whether distributors or OEMs, rightly demand the highest achievable standards of quality and service, and we continually review our operations to ensure we meet or exceed expectations.
As a company we are as strong and dynamic now as at any time in our history. Here is a snapshot view of where we are today and how we intend to evolve over the next few years.
Richard Bulgin
Sales and Marketing Director
The business fundamentals
It has never been sufficient simply to supply electronic components. Customers need assurance of quality at fair prices, good technical support and fast, reliable delivery.
They also want leading-edge new products which enable them to launch exciting new applications on the market.
Bulgin has always excelled at meeting these demands. We work very closely with both customers and suppliers, building strong and mutually beneficial relationships, constantly improving our standards of quality and performance - and our ability to react fast to customer's needs.
Resources for continued investment
In a business environment where fierce competition and stringent customer demands are a fact of life, Bulgin is in a strong position to plan with confidence.
Our corporate finances are healthy, providing us with resources for continued investment. Our workforce is one of the most stable, skilled and reliable in the industry, and we have an exceptional pool of talented engineers to design, develop and manufacture our products.
We will continue to expand our business by developing our current markets and introducing new product innovations. Above all, we shall continue to invest in advanced technologies to improve performance and enable us to offer market-leading new products - together with the essential infrastructure to serve and support our customers worldwide.
Putting technology to work
Our ability to get new products out fast - whether additions to our standard ranges or bespoke items for customers - starts with an advanced approach to design and development.
Design engineers work with sales and marketing specialists in flexible development teams. These teams are extensively equipped with computer-assisted tools such as the latest 3D modelling system. Serving five workstations, the system allows rapid progression from first design and fine-tuning through to prototyping and manufacture.
Product marketing engineers co-ordinate the work of the marketing, development, production and sales functions, ensuring rapid, right-first-time development accurately matched to the market’s needs.
The benefits of complete control
We perform nearly all our manufacturing in house. This approach - in contrast to subcontracted manufacture - provides some critically important advantages.
In particular, we retain total control over the entire manufacturing process from raw materials through production to inspection and testing. Both quality management and product availability remain entirely in our own hands.
Our extensive facilities include an automated plastics moulding shop, metal press shop and electroplating shop for conductive parts. Assembly is by automatic or manual techniques as appropriate. Together, these facilities enable us to provide exactly what the customers want, when they want it, from low-volume, turnkey solutions to the mass-produced volumes of our standard ranges.
The can-do response
We try very hard never to say ‘no’ to a customer. One of the major benefits of handling virtually all our design and manufacture in-house is that it provides a rare degree of flexibility.
The extensive knowledge base within our teams allows us routinely to produce customised components and assemblies, ranging from minor modifications right through to one-off specials for OEMs.
We are equally adept at changing a product line mid-stream in response to developing market or business needs - and because we have close control over every stage, we can often respond within timescales few competitors would even attempt.
Flexibility through training
As well as serving our customers better, our inherent flexibility enables us to introduce new products very rapidly. Given the already enormous variety of our products, it’s clear that flexibility is also a key requirement for our staff.
As well as selecting people carefully, we provide them with excellent, on-going training to make sure they have the skills they need. For example, around 130 production staff have achieved NVQ qualifications in electronic assembly over the last two years. Warehouse staff and toolsetters have similarly achieved appropriate NVQs.
This high-quality training equips people to move readily between product lines, increasing our efficiency and allowing quicker turnaround of non-standard and customised products.
In pursuit of quality
Good design, high quality and maximum value have formed an integral part of the Bulgin philosophy throughout its history.
We maintain a documented quality plan specifying process and product goals and are now approved by BSI to ISO9001:2000.
Investment in new plant and equipment makes an important contribution to continuous quality improvements. The risk of errors in the transition from design to manufacture is greatly reduced by the digital data flows from our CAD system, and our sophisticated automatic manufacturing equipment which can form and assemble components to consistently high quality standards.
The zero-defects goal
All new products are extensively tested preproduction in our dedicated electrical and mechanical test facility, which also conducts regular checks during manufacture.
However, the emphasis is increasingly on trapping errors at source. Quality assurance is increasingly built into the production procedures themselves. By enabling operatives to take responsibility for their own output, we reduce reliance on batch inspections further down the line. To achieve this we provide individually monitored quality training plans - and continuously monitor the success of the training plans themselves, regularly improving and updating them.
Our quality system continues to evolve as we pursue our ultimate goal, the achievement of zero-defect production.
The wider responsibilities
As a company we have grown with the electronics industry itself, and are fully aware of our responsibility to minimise the environmental impact of our activities.
When developing a new product, we include an environmental assessment as an integral part of the design process, considering every stage from production through to delivery.
We have completely eliminated the use of ozone-depleting substances in our own activities and throughout the supply chain. We invest heavily to achieve compliance with regulations, and indeed are often ahead of them - as demonstrated by our long-established treatment works for plating shop effluents. We will continue to refine our operation to achieve ISO 14001 accreditation.
Looking after the work force
Bulgin has received Health & Safety awards for each of the last seven years. In addition to complying with the letter and spirit of the regulations, we try to go further in ensuring a pleasant working environment for all our people.
This includes a policy of positive encouragement for staff with disablements of one kind or another, through the provision of any special facilities they need in order to work on equal terms with other staff. The success of our policies was recognised some time ago when our manufacturing site received an award under the national ‘Fitness for Work’ scheme.
Training and development are given the highest priority throughout the organisation, enabling people to do their job better and derive greater satisfaction.
Alongside quality and design, every customer naturally wants to know about costs and availability.
The need to keep our costs thoroughly competitive is a major driving force throughout the business. We employ total cost management as a matter of routine. We constantly look for, and work to eliminate, operations which fail to add value.
Integrated project management of new products ensures that everyone involved, from design through to assembly and packaging, is fully aware of cost and quality issues. Often we succeed in reducing costs through the introduction of new plant, equipment and materials to exploit the latest technology - thus providing both our customers and ourselves with competitive advantage.
Fast and dependable
We aim to quote accurate and reliable lead times, monitoring our own performance to ensure we provide the service Bulgin customers expect.
Dependable, on-time delivery involves successfully clearing two major hurdles. The first is to ensure that products are manufactured on time and in the right quantities. We achieve this through close integration of our planning, procurement, production and order processing procedures.
The second hurdle is to ensure the right channels are in place to provide efficient customer service - whether directly or through our support system of national and global distributors. When entering new areas, we take care to install an adequate distribution network before our products are offered to the market.
Bulgin continues to improve all its business processes with the aim of achieving its corporate goals.
This page updated: 3 December, 2007