Creativity and Expertise key to over 40 years of Success

With continuous innovation a primary focus for the manufacturing industry, Titan Enterprises, a supplier of liquid flow metering solutions for over 40 years to a range of industries, strongly believes the company’s success can be attributed to its design and engineering expertise, with R&D mainly driven by customer-specific applications.

Recognising from the outset that improvisation and creativity were the key to securing the company’s market foothold, managing director Trevor Forster, who founded the company in 1981, steered the business into production of modestly priced, high-quality, low flow measuring devices, that also provided affordable and lasting solutions for its OEM customers.

“More than once we’ve been told ‘You can’t do that’, but we’ve just done it anyway!” Trevor recalls. “The way we work with customers from research, development, through to production has enabled us to solve a lot of OEM application issues,” Trevor adds. “Through that process, we’ve helped customers decrease their assembly times, improve efficiency, and provide extra functionality.”

R&D projects have included testing new materials for longer life, chemical inertness, and robustness, under conditions of high pressure and high temperature, or through software development designed around pushing the boundaries of both the physical properties and performance of the products.

Some of Titan’s most popular flow meters have been born out of collaborations. “We have a proud history of working with some of industry’s key players, such as Coca Cola Enterprises Ltd, RS Components and Vianet, to industry specialists like Formula 1, the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II team, Paxman Coolers, Stored Crop Conservation and Green Fuels,” Trevor says. “Our USP is our flexibility, adaptability and ability to work with customers to understand their applications and find workable solutions.”

Work on developing a viable, accurate ultrasonic meter began in 2001 with a collaboration between Titan’s R&D team and The Cranfield Institute of Technology. The resulting patented ultrasonic technology led to an expanding line of Atrato® ultrasonic flowmeters.

“We do not shy away from spending on Research and Development. Industry doesn’t stand still and investing in R&D is paramount to us staying ahead of the game and taking advantage of the latest technologies. Our R&D spend is 20% of our turnover where the norm is 8-10%,” said Trevor.

“The focus technology for Titan at present is our ultrasonic liquid flow measurement devices. Taking our Atrato® ultrasonic flowmeter product design understanding, we have pushed both electronics and physical design to improve the overall performance window. From our extensive pioneering work with a USA medical company to produce a disposable ultrasonic flowmeter that measures the volume of liquid manually injected into a patient, to recently launching our new software interface for the Atrato.” 

Trevor concluded, “When you are confident in your own capabilities, willing to take a few risks, invest resources into R&D and know what your customers and market want, taking on challenges can be very fruitful.”

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