subcon scene materials supply
Cutting and drilling are
prominent elements in
the added value capability
which enables Apollo to
‘tick off’ early stages in
customers’ production
processes
A metal stockist evolves into a strategic supplier and supply chain
partner for companies located all around the world - including many
subcontractors - while sustaining a philosophy which recognises the
needs of individual customers. By Andy Sandford
Local and global
THE acquisition of Apollo Metals by ThyssenKrupp
is just the latest headline in a story that has seen Apollo
evolve from a metal stockist into an international
strategic partner for aerospace OEMs. It brings together
Apollo’s predominantly European and Far Eastern
business and ThyssenKrupp’s largely US-based
operations to create ThyssenKrupp Aerospace, a new
global division with 30 locations in 13 countries.
Heading up the new division is Apollo’s CEO Stuart
Wilkins, and he traces the origins of the company’s
transformation back to the 1980s when it decided to
focus on the aerospace industry: ‘Apollo became
aerospace approved in 1980 but by the late ’80s had
become a market leader in the UK aerospace industry
supplying aluminium plate, sheet and bar. In 1993 we
won a contract with BAe in which they wanted us to
supply all their material types, not just aluminium, but
also steel and titanium. They wanted to outsource all
the materials supply so that they had no inventory
except work in progress and wanted a flow of materials
direct to the shop floor to coincide with their rate of
production.’
To be able to offer this wider range of materials,
Apollo started working with, and later acquired, the
specialist hard metals supplier, Aviation Metals. As
Apollo’s customers adopted JIT and TQM methods they
continued to demand a wider rage of services to those
traditionally offered and this led the company to look
much more closely at its own processes.
‘We were involved in exercises with our customers
72 MWP january 2008
which looked at the “Total Cost” of the materials, ie not
just the raw material but the costs of processing and
logistics. This had a major impact on our approach.
Today 95% of the material we supply is processed in
some way. That might mean cutting to size, profile
cutting near to the net shape of the component, or
drilling tooling holes and doing some preparatory
machining - all of which takes what we supply nearer
to the finished product. The whole process involves
working closely with customers to ensure that what we
are proposing is cost effective and adds value.
Effectively we share the same objective: making our
customers more competitive so that we can grow with
them.’
In recent years, competitiveness has become
determined by the efficiency not just of the OEM but
their whole supply chain. ‘A lot of our major customers
have outsourced manufacturing to subcontractors
around the globe. So whereas previously we delivered to
one site, now the material is split and delivered to eight
or ten different subcontractors who could be in China,
India, America, the UK, France, Germany - all over the
world.’
To optimise material supply across these supply
chains to achieve a least cost approach means looking at
a number of different areas. At the raw material level,
demand has to be aggregated globally to ensure
economic batch sizes which conform to the
requirements of the metal producers. ‘The metal
producers want to produce in tonnes, but the usage of
the subcontractors could be a matter of a few kilograms
per batch,’ says Wilkins. ‘By aggregating demand on a
global basis we can buy the mill-produced quantities,
but to optimise usage and to eliminate waste requires a
close working relationship with each subcontractor at a
local level.’
And, he says, to achieve a low-cost approach you have
to be optimising right through the supply chain and
this means operating in different countries. ‘A few
years ago we were supplying Hawker DeHavilland in
Australia as an export customer. They said that what
they really wanted was a locally based JIT service and
added value processing, so could we set up an operation
there. We looked at what was involved, recognised that
this was a strategic shift in the market and decided to do
it. Since then we have gone on to do the same thing for
other customers: in Finland for Patria, for
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