Partner Article

AMAP breathe new life into battery-testing machine

A chance conversation has led to an unused machine with an unhelpful instruction manual being brought back to life thanks to the team at AMAP - the University of Sunderland’s Institute for Automotive and Manufacturing Advanced Practice.

Managing director at Cell Pack Solutions, Eddie Czestochowski, had been chatting about current challenges to a colleague at a recent meeting of the Advanced Manufacturing Forum (AMF).

Eddie picked up the story: “The AMF meetings are a good place to network and share best practice. At a recent meeting I was talking to a colleague about challenges and I mentioned this piece of machinery that has been standing idle at Cell Pack for a couple of years. I picked it up second hand, though it’s a quite expensive piece of battery testing equipment that would have been about £8,000 new.”

“I had high hopes for it as it’s capable of testing and analysing 100 batteries at a time. But when we came to look at it, all the instructions and displays were in Chinese. Despite our best efforts and a lot of time spent trying to translate the instructions we couldn’t get it to work.”

Eddie started Cell Pack Solutions in 1998, he said. Having grown from a sole trader at home to a small office in Jarrow, he moved to a larger workspace in South Shields in 2001.

Eddie expanded: “We took on our first employee and became a limited company in March of that year. The philosophy behind the company has always been about growth through innovation, our company has grown steadily over the years employing more local people by establishing great partnerships with our customers and suppliers.”

In 2013 Eddie found a piece of land for Cell Pack’s new premises and set about building a new 9,000 sq ft purpose-built premises from scratch to his exact specifications in Rekendyke, South Shields. The new space gives the company, which employs 20 people, independence and has created capacity for future growth.

Eddie continued: “So here we are in 2015, in our lovely new building with a piece of equipment sitting there that would help improve our business offer and we can’t get it to work. All the instructions are in Chinese, which none of us understand. You can imagine my frustration.”

After the conversation at the Advanced Manufacturing Forum, things progressed quickly. “Two weeks after the meeting I got a call from Roger [O’Brien)] at AMAP”, Czestochowski continued. “He said, ‘I’ve heard you have a machine sitting idle, can I send over a couple of our associates to see if we can get it working for you?’ Of course I agreed and soon after Dirk Kok, a Research Fellow, and his colleague Dr Jing Jiang, a Research Associate, arrived, looked at the machine and agreed they could help.”

Dirk and Jing, both part of the AMAP team at the University of Sunderland, quickly got to work, speaking to the manufacturer in China and working out a solution.

Eddie continued: “Dirk knew how to solve the issue; he came into the factory, got the back off the machine and hacked the chip, recoding it into English. It all happened very fast.

“The greatest challenge was finding a PC still running XP to link to the machine! Once we had resolved that Dirk and Jing came back a week ago and wired everything up. We’re now able to programme the machine using a PC and get it working for us, I’m well impressed that they came in and solved the problem, and the speed at which they worked. This was something we had been trying to do for a long time internally and they sorted it for us in no time.”

Roger O’Brien, Director of AMAP commented; “We were asked by MAS, the Manufacturing Advisory Service, now part of the Government’s BGS [Business Growth Services], if we would mind contacting Eddie to see if we could assist Cell Pack Solutions. They told us that Cell Pack had this complex bit of kit that they couldn’t get to work. Two of our staff working at AMAP, along with myself, went to meet with Eddie and had a look at the machine. They took the back off and Jing Jiang was able to interpret the instructions.

“Dirk Kok, our Electronics and Batteries Research Fellow at AMAP, discovered that it was more than a simple translation job, so he worked on the circuit board while Jing Jiang spoke to the manufacturer in China. The team was determined and with a bit of dialogue back and forth to China they got the machine functioning again.

“We’re delighted we could help Eddie and Cell Pack Solutions, they now have a valuable piece of equipment they can use effectively and AMAP has created a new relationship. It was good experience for Dirk and Jing too. At AMAP we’re all about providing support and intervention to get companies expanding, networking and functioning at capacity.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Roger O’Brien .