News

For the last two years PennWhite has supported young motorcycle racer Bradley Hughes in the GP125 and Superstock 600 British Superbike (BSB) Championship. After some impressive points scoring results against older and more experienced competitors, 16 year old Bradley is moving up to the prestigious Supersport Evo class in 2014.

PennWhite will again support Bradley this year and the blue and white PennWhite liveried bike and rider will be live on British Eurosport in the BSB Supersport Sprint races. With coverage throughout each race weekend and midweek highlights, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to follow Bradley and the PennWhite bike over the 12 race season.

Bradley’s first Supersport Evo race is on the Brands Hatch Indy Circuit over the Easter weekend (18th – 21st April). The full calendar can be found at www.britishsuperbike.com and you can discover more about Bradley himself at www.bradhracing.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

At the end of 2013 one of PennWhite’s printing industry customers assessed the performance of their key suppliers over the previous 12 months. They rated each supplier based on the quality of their product and their customer service.

Just a few days into the New Year we received our results; PennWhite Print Solutions received top marks, an “A” grade for both product and service.

“It’s very pleasing to get that sort of feedback from a customer,” said Managing Director John Whitehead, “Our aim is to make buying from PennWhite straightforward and easy. Manufacture a product that is fit for purpose and deliver it when the customer wants it is a simple concept, but hard work and commitment is needed to make it happen.  Positive feedback like this is a testament to the efforts of PennWhite’s production and administration teams.”

A third raw material bulk storage tank has been installed at our Middlewich manufacturing facility, this one dedicated to PennWhite Print Solutions’ range of Finasil silicone emulsions. With a capacity of 24,000 litres and standing almost 7 meters tall, the tank will provide valuable extra on-site storage at PennWhite.

Production Manager Stephen Whitehead is overseeing commissioning of the tank and explains the benefits it will deliver once up and running, “Our experience and expertise has helped establish PennWhite Print Solutions as a major supplier of silicone emulsions to the printing industry, but the nature of commercial printing means that we often need to manufacture our premium Finasil products at short notice to meet customer deadlines. This is not a problem if we have key raw materials in stock and that’s where the new bulk tank comes in.” Stephen continued, “Having more raw material instantly available will allow us to satisfy last-minute Finasil orders whatever their size. This sort of investment demonstrates our commitment to meeting the unique needs of the printing industry.”

Our new 2014 desk calendar is now available and will be on the way to customers very shortly.

This year’s calendar focuses on the people of PennWhite and provides an insight in to the hobbies, interests and skills of a few of the PennWhite team. So, if you want to know why we call our warehouse manager “sir”, why our technical director gets excited by steep roads or even why our purchasing administrator really spends so much time in the kitchen, look out for your copy of the 2014 calendar in the post.

Formulating high performance chemical process aids is not a straightforward proposition. Variables such as ambient temperature, raw material consistency, water hardness, pumping pressure and operator experience can easily influence the quality of a finished product.

PennWhite works extremely hard to control such variables using our ISO 9001 systems and a stringent product testing procedure. We aim to “get it right first time, every time.” In January 2013 the PennWhite laboratory team established a project whose goal was to reduce the number of batches that don’t achieve our quality standards.

The results are in. After months of continuous data collection, investigation, analysis and testing the number of non-conforming batches has fallen by 50% and our first time QC pass rate has risen to 93%. Whilst this is a great start, the project is on going and our lab team will continue to strive for a first time pass rate of 100%.