Committed to Manufacturing Excellence
Simon Martin, Head of Global Manufacturing for Yunex Traffic provides an insight into our Poole-based operation and how we manufacture more than “just traffic lights”.
Please give us a brief history of the manufacturing site in Poole
Manufacturing first began on the Sopers Lane site in May 1940, with munitions being made under the control of the Ministry of Defence. In fact, firing ranges were still part of the site in the 1950’s when the Government started to make the site available for other users.
In 1966 Plessey took over the whole 28 acre site and so began a long and proud track record of product innovation and manufacturing excellence in Poole. Among the many notable inventions to have been designed, developed and produced here are the bar code and barcode scanners, and the ‘Ernie’ machine, which has selected the UK’s winning premium bond numbers every week since 1957! At its height, around 3,000 people worked here.
The site was then bought by Siemens in 1989, after which products for our global customer base have been manufactured here. With Siemens ITS becoming Yunex Traffic in 2021, the site remains the global manufacturing hub for the business, producing an extensive range of traffic management technology.
Can you give us a few facts and figures?
- Our manufacturing plant covers 8,500 square metres
- We employ 220 people in the production unit
- We export to more than 80 countries worldwide
- We make over 400 different types of printed circuit board (PCB)
- We manufacture in excess of 400,000 PCBs every year
- We offer 10,000 different permutations of traffic signals
Apart from ITS equipment, what else can you manufacture?
We have a wealth of experience and expertise across our manufacturing operation which allows us to provide a broad range of services to customers worldwide, manufacturing everything from traffic controllers and communication devices to ANPR cameras and motion detectors.
Our services include production engineering support, complex PCB design, build, configuration, testing and repair, and full box build assembly, for any application. We also provide full life cycle management from product development right through to the provision of spares and aftermarket management.
Each of our production cells is extremely flexible, and with the ability to manage changeovers quickly and efficiently, we are perfectly suited to high-mix, low- to medium-volume manufacture. This allows us to cost-effectively manufacture batch sizes from a single prototype right up to quantities of 2,000 PCBs and more.
We are certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 14000 quality and environmental standards, with both sustainability and quality at the heart of our operations, with full serialisation and traceability embedded at every step of our operations.
Supported by our trusted supply chain, we have established partnerships with suppliers based in the UK, Europe and around the world, including many small and medium-sized local UK companies, all of whom are managed by our experienced Global Commodity team. We are also experienced in export control, and routinely manage deliveries to customers in over 60 countries worldwide.
We remain completely committed to manufacturing excellence and to achieving the highest standards in every aspect of our operations. To ensure we continue to achieve this, we have recently made a significant investment in robotics to automate repetitive production processes. We have also invested in the latest Pick and Place machines for our PCB surface mount lines, which will be commissioned in April, alongside new, state-of-the-art 3D Automatic Optical Solder Inspection machines, which will support our production quality optimisation.
With this continued investment, proven performance and a dedicated and experienced manufacturing team, we look forward to working with businesses across the UK and helping to deliver their specific production requirements.
