Farne Engineering is a small team of dedicated engineers who have the responsibility of ensuring that the production machinery, site plant and buildings are maintained in a safe condition. In recent years significant investment has occurred (£4m in 2004) at our Duns factory in machinery and plant with more investment planned for 2005 this includes a new workshop which we are a looking forward to. This has resulted in changes within the department which will see it double in size.

The tasks of an engineer vary from day to day. There is planned maintenance, reactive maintenance and repairs to machines.
An engineer is on site early in the morning, checking the plant to ensure that all the services are available when the day shift comes in at 6am to start production with cover continuing throughout the day until 10.30pm.

The engineers will update the PMS (Planned Maintenance Schedule), and will check the stocks of ready-to-use parts to ensure when maintenance is due, the parts are available. The maintenance engineers liaise with production colleagues for machine access, so as to minimise disruption to production plans.

In the department, the engineers have to be reactive to production requirements for "on the spot" repairs and consultation on problems occurring on equipment. When planning larger works or investing in new buildings or machinery a lot of the work is carried out by subcontractors and suppliers, who are controlled by the engineering department when on site.