WDS Components – A New LAE Corporate Member
Council are pleased to announce that WDS Components Ltd. have joined the association as Corporate Members. A warm welcome is extended to the company, based at Grangefield Industrial Estate, Richardshaw Road, Pudsey LS28 6LE.
Click here to view the company’s website:- WDS Components
Sales & Marketing Director Mark Moody has kindly forwarded this comprehensive information below about the company:-
WDS is a leading European manufacturer and global supplier of Standard Parts, Machine Accessories and Work Holding Components, with a long history and an impressive pedigree.
The WDS range of products is characterised by high quality, superior performance, unrivalled choice and excellent value for money. WDS is innovative and regularly reviews the market, evaluating its product offering and enhancing its range to meet current and future customer requirements.
For over 70 years WDS has continuously worked to improve and develop our customer relationships, manufacturing operations, and product quality. The business was originally formed in 1952 under the name Woodside Die Sinking Co. Ltd. It was acquired some 6 years later by BOC Engineering who wanted to develop, manufacture and market a new range of standard components for jigs and fixtures; later to become known as ‘Tooling Aids’.
This enterprise did not, however, prove profitable and was sold in 1964 to a group of private shareholders whose new name for the company incorporated the initial letters of the old. WDS Tooling Aids Ltd was turned around within two years and went from strength to strength. We are a company committed to engineering excellence, we have grown from line shaft-driven machines and manual lathes in 1952 to developing a highly trained, in-house engineering team who are behind the design of most of our range. Our warehouse carries more than £3m of stock and over 50,00 sku’s, which allows us to provide same-day despatch across our entire range, we also have over 7,000 sku’s under our unique stock guarantee. This capability enables us to provide an unrivalled stock availability in the marketplace, that our customers value.
We introduced the Stock Guarantee in early 2021 to give customers confidence and to combat the growing pressures on global supply chains, and the changing demands of our customers, as they responded to the same issues we were. This proposition ensures supply to our customers, provides reliable guaranteed service, and we continue to add products to the guarantee.
We are a company that has and continues to invest in UK manufacturing. As a company with a long pedigree in engineering, we are committed to finding new and better ways to improve our manufacturing, and product development. We are committed to achieving best in class, but we recognise we still have room for improvement. In the last 24 months we have committed to real investment, we invested in machines to improve manufacturing capabilities and efficiencies, further investment in machines and automation has continued. We purchased three additional CNC automatic lathes in late 2022, which we use to manufacture high volumes of smaller diameter components such as studs, nuts and bolts. We have continued to invest in our manufacturing with a new milling machine, that was installed and now operational in October 2023. This investment boosts our lights-out manufacturing capacity, and it has facilitated shifts to allow greater output to meet our growing customer demands and to support the stock guarantee proposition. It allows us to effectively double our production of high-volume parts. In addition, Not only do the new machines improve our capacity, but they also reduce set-up time, machine cycle times and they eliminate need for manual product change over with both ends cutting. This heavy investment is a demonstration of our continuous pledge to enhance our proposition to customers. Our Leeds based manufacturing facility is the key reason for our ability to supply such a volume of products, driven by our skilled workforce who ensure quality and consistency for our offerings. We are now looking carefully at our product ranges to see what additional products we can make in the UK.
We know it’s as important to invest in our people as it is our products, and we have a diverse and highly skilled workforce. WDS are dedicated to empowering our teams with the skills and qualifications that they need to perform to the best of their abilities. Over the years, WDS has provided both short and long-term training opportunities from skill training programmes to chartered institute course qualifications.
We seek constant feedback from customers using services like Trust Pilot. Where we have a score of 4.7 which is significantly above our industry digital benchmarks. We aim to reply all customer feedback, not just Trustpilot, but with surveys, and even asking people to rate our management of enquiries through the helpdesk CRM system. We have set ambitious targets for our environmental and sustainability team to achieve. We are now focussed very much on energy and resources to reduce the use of water, Gas, Electric and Paper. We are also aiming at new accreditations, and we currently exploring ISO 45001 alongside our already accredited ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.
As a key player in the components and standard parts industry, WDS believe that the technology behind our design and manufacture is vital to our core as a business. Despite changes in technology over the past 70 years, the design concepts behind many of our parts have remained as important today as they did in the past. With a strong passion for design engineering, WDS have become well versed in adapting to the shifts in design technology over the past seven decades. WDS was an early adopter of CAD (Computer aided design) during its introduction in the 1980’s, we even offered 2D CAD model drawings from our ‘WDS CADalogue’ posted to customers on 3.5” floppy discs. This innovation allowed our customers to browse an on-screen catalogue and download 2d DXF or DWG files to integrate into their own AutoCAD projects. The next crucial adaption for WDS was 3D CAD technology, as SolidWorks was introduced to the industry. Since the 90’s WDS has kept pace with every version of SolidWorks and incorporated the technology across all aspects of our research and development. Now WDS provide over 40,000 3D CAD models, covering our entire range which are free to download for our customers.
In more recent times, WDS have introduced Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMM) to inspect, and measure manufactured parts and components to the highest level of accuracy. Not only did this new technology allow us to enhance our manufacturing accuracy for our engineering customers, but it also enables us to confidently supply industries such as aerospace, and automotive which requires very high standards.
We have shown strong, sustainable commercial performance with significant organic growth through product innovation and new products. We have capitalised on market opportunities and we have taken bold and brave decisions on investment and increased stock levels, and it these decisions that have improved our service levels to customers. We have recently launched a new “core value” proposition constructed on an away day with our operational departmental managers. This will soon be seen publicly across social media channels, and on our web site putting the customer at the heart of everything we do and strive to achieve. WDS Components can demonstrate it is a forward-thinking SME with big ambitions and very broad talent. We are an award-winning business and we are delighted to be part of the Leeds Engineers Association and to share that association with customers and colleagues.
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