The UK arm of Japanese pneumatic automation maker SMC, with a 14-acre site in Milton Keynes that holds production, logistics, offices and a European technical centre.
SMC makes pneumatic automation equipment, which is the cylinders, valves, fittings and vacuum parts that use compressed air to make machines move. On its UK page, SMC calls itself the UK and world market leader in supplying and supporting pneumatic automation technology; that is the company's claim. Its standard range holds more than 12,000 items with over 700,000 variants, and 30 to 40 new or improved products are launched each year, according to a UK trade article. Customers include food, packaging, car, electronics and life science manufacturers.
SMC Corporation was established in Japan in 1959, and its UK company opened in 1978. Worldwide it has about 500 sales offices in more than 80 countries and 30 manufacturing sites, and over 23,000 people. We did not find a formal mission statement. The UK page does say SMC supports just-in-time working with custom-designed pneumatic systems built by skilled teams, and that it keeps investing in new product development. It also lists ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 certificates and a PAS 2060 carbon neutral certificate.
In the UK, SMC bought a 14-acre site in Milton Keynes in 1998. It houses production, logistics and administration, and shares its site with one of SMC's two European Technical Centres. The UK page says about 300 colleagues work at Milton Keynes, plus 70 field-based sales staff. A trade article says roughly 70 R&D engineers provide technical support to UK customers. Many products are finished or assembled by UK teams, which allows quicker delivery and made-to-order solutions.
The same trade article described recent investment in a specialist test room, a refurbished showroom and a new global computer system, and said UK stock levels had been raised after the Brexit vote and before Covid-19. It gives no date on the page we read, so we treat the detail as undated. SMC's UK pages also link to a heritage page, a sustainability report and a modern slavery statement, which suggests the company values its history and reporting on its impact.
A site like this offers jobs in engineering, technical support, assembly and production, stock control and logistics, sales, IT, finance and customer service. Good starting subjects include maths, physics, design and technology and computing. If you like working out how things move, from a robot arm to a bottling line, pneumatics is a quiet but important part of the answer, and SMC is one of the best-known names in it.
Website: www.smc.eu/en-gb
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