Always helped quickly

Bringing as much added value as quickly as possible. It could be the slogan of family business Aciers GRP from Charleroi. A steel business that does much more than buy and sell. From its huge stock and with a very diverse range of machinery, it delivers for customers steel, stainless steel and aluminum perfectly tailored. Whether it needs to be sawn, (plasma) cut, folded, painted ... or blasted. The most recent acquisition on the shop floor is the Behringer automatic saw. This means that mitre cuts are now also done automatically. A gain in time and precision.

Looking far for quality material, Aciers GRP does not have to go far. This steel business lies in the shadow, so to speak, of Arcelor Mittal's site in Charleroi. Manager Patrick Vincent: "It used to be even closer, but in 1989 we brought our three depots together on one new large site of almost 1 ha. My father and I sensed even then that the market was changing." Indeed, from then on Aciers GRP was able to deliver steel, stainless steel and aluminum to its customers entirely according to their wishes and specifications from one large workshop. "Whereas customers used to invest in metalworking machinery themselves, they now prefer to put it in our hands. That way they can focus on assembling and mounting the pieces." Aciers GRP can count on a team of ten employees to do this.

Precision and speed crucial

For Vincent, two conditions are really crucial to providing customized service to customers. That everything is done particularly precisely and that everything is done particularly quickly. "In this regard, we start from a large stock. There are just under a million tons of material in stock here. Not large volumes, but a lot of diverse materials, both sheet metal and profiles, beams, pipes ... this allows us to respond very reactively to customer requests. After all, if a shaft breaks somewhere on a machine, they can't afford downtime." In turn, to guarantee accuracy, Aciers GRP counts on a very extensive machine park. "We always try to go the extra mile to make our customers' lives easier. After all, that is the essence of a family business: helping your customers get ahead as well and as quickly as possible. We try to live up to that every day by staying on the ball. In production, but also with our own logistics."

Reliability of machine and service

The most recent purchase was the Behringer automatic saw machine. This machine initially served as a replacement for an existing sawing machine that was already past its best years. Vincent: "Sawing is a crucial operation in our production. We have a total of six sawing machines. But what I was looking for in this case was automatic mitre cutting. Automatically, on the one hand to be able to work faster, but above all to increase precision. 1 mm must always be 1 mm so that the pieces fit together perfectly afterwards at the customer's premises." For Vincent, reliability is the crucial factor in all investments. "You have to be able to count on the machines you have but also on the suppliers behind them. I had already heard from other metalworkers in the area that Behringer's quality and Promatt's service are beyond question."

Working autonomously

Something Vincent has also been experiencing on the shop floor for a year and a half now. "The technology at the heart of this machine is a lot more advanced than what we had. You notice that in everything: from the quality of the cut to the speed. But at the same time, the operation has become particularly intuitive. Our operator mastered the Behringer, the first one on the shop floor, in no time. Based on the order, he programs the machine, then it's just a matter of pressing the button. It can then work perfectly autonomously and delivers the quality and productivity we were looking for. We are also very satisfied with Promatt's service. You can calculate how much a machine will cost and what it will deliver. But good support is priceless," Vincent concludes.