Through its longstanding collaboration with Tornos, Swiss manufacturer Gloor Medical was able to meet a rapid increase in demand for components needed in the fight against COVID-19.
For more than 70 years, the core competence of Gloor Brothers, an owner-managed family business based in Burgdorf, Switzerland, has been the regulation of pressure and flow of technical gases. When the business earned its EN ISO: 13485 Certification in 1994, this competence was extended to medical technology, and it has been continually expanded upon ever since.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for fittings for therapeutic oxygen delivery devices has risen sharply, resulting in a capacity bottleneck in the turning department at Gloor. Thanks to a longstanding collaboration between Gloor Medical and Tornos, both of these leaders in their respective fields were able to react quickly and make valuable lifesaving contributions.
Gloor Medical is an industry-leading supplier in Switzerland in the medical gas supply field, and its services range from the planning and implementation of the pipeline network in hospitals and doctors’ practices, to the fittings for supplying patients with the required medical gases. Its product range covers the supply of medical gases from central gas supply systems to fittings for mobile emergency medicine.
The central gas supply includes automatic switchover of the supply sources with medical gases, the area shutoff and monitoring units, up to the extraction point of the gases for supplying the patients with the necessary medical gases. The range is supplemented by all the withdrawal devices, pressure and flow regulators, and vacuum fittings. Gloor Medical’s products are developed and produced in-house to provide the flexibility to respond quickly and professionally to special customer needs and to develop and manufacture the required products.
Gloor Brothers has maintained a close partnership with Tornos in the field of turning machines for decades. In the 1990s, the management team decided to purchase its first Tornos CNC machine, which is still in operation today for special fittings. Over time, five more Tornos single-spindle sliding headstock lathes were added. These CNC machines play a major role in ensuring that brass parts can be manufactured to the required quality to ensure the reliable operation of fittings in the medical sector.
Andreas Weyermann, Head of Manufacturing at Gloor Brothers, has been delighted with the recent arrival of a brand new Tornos EvoDECO 32, which was chosen for its impressive capabilities and precision.
“Our employees are trained at the Tornos Academy in Moutier,” he says. “When they return from their courses, they have mastered the machine and its programs and can reach their full potential.
That potential is in a continuous process of development as the market is constantly evolving, Weyermann adds: “The coronavirus pandemic has greatly increased the demand for our products. So, we had to increase our production capacity to meet the demand.”
In this task, Gloor Brothers can rely on the performance of the Tornos machines, which run at full speed day and night.
“We still work in one shift, but the machines have a certain autonomy and run unattended for several hours at night in the so-called ghost shift,” Weyermann explains. “Our company currently has about 90 employees, seven of whom are apprentices in the poly-mechanic and commercial clerk professions. In Germany, we have a subsidiary in Lübeck, which is active in the sales and services of products for medical technology.”
All manufacturing phases, from design to the final product, are carried out by the Burgdorf-based company, and quality is monitored throughout the entire process. Precision, flexibility, sustainability and social commitment are a matter of course for Gloor Brothers, and Tornos is a reliable partner in the firm’s goal of daily improvement in these challenging times.