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A year on from winning an accolade in our prestigious Annual Industry Awards, Labman are making significant moves in the engineering and scientific worlds.

Labman’s story began in 1979, founded by George Carter, a professor of control engineering at Durham University, who set out initially to build educational robotics. After many successful years, the company switched direction to laboratory robotics, before being acquired in 1993 by now owner, Andrew Whitwell, who grew the team from a start-up with just seven employees to 160 in the present day, with a headquarters in Seamer, Stokesley, as well as offices in Bracknell and Liverpool.

The organisation offers custom research and development projects in the field of laboratory robotics, making complex projects safer through automated processes, including liquid handling and powder dosing.

They also sell their own range of off-the-shelf products and offer stand-alone custom software developed in-house, as well as bioprocessing automation which is taking the pharmaceutical manufacturing market by storm.

Since winning NEPIC’s Engineering Firm of the Year Award, the organisation has had one thing on its mind, expansion. Their eclectic HQ, spanning 5,000 sq m, is undergoing another extension to double its current size and make way for new systems, spurred on by the huge number of customer orders which sees them near capacity until 2026.

But it’s not just local expansion on the horizon, as the company is setting its sights on the USA next, opening its first office in North Carolina in 2025.

Discussing how scaling up is enabling a huge recruitment drive within the organisation, Johannes Hesford, head of marketing and Tom Smith, head of bioprocess automation at Labman said:

“Not only are we growing the business, but we are growing our team too. As a firm we believe in providing opportunities to the younger generation within engineering, we have always been big on apprenticeships, having employed 11 apprentices this year already, we also take on graduates and offer industry placements to university students.

“We are committed to creating opportunities for our workforce that allow them to develop their skills, we don’t pigeonhole them into roles, if there’s something they’d like to work on, we can tailor the role to suit their passions.”

The company will be releasing 50 roles based at their Seamer HQ over the next 12 months which will include project managers, mechanical, software and electrical engineers, admin and sales, as well as roles at their London and Liverpool offices, with aims of releasing 100 more jobs in the following few years.

But the company’s successes wouldn’t come without collaboration, deeply rooted in its values, Johannes went on to say:

“Collaboration is so important in engineering. Since day one of a project, we work closely with our customers. We get involved in the early stages of innovation, where the science is just being created, we look at how we can create technology that fully brings customers’ ideas to life.

“We enable their science, engineering a solution that can’t be bought off the shelf, so it’s imperative to us during the lifespan of the project that we continuously collaborate. We’ll often sit in the labs next to our customers, getting to grips with every nuance of their workflows, to ensure a final Labman system meets their needs.”

It’s this approach that has facilitated the organisation’s close-knit collaborations throughout the North East process industry, with the likes of Micropore Technologies, and CPI.

Over the last 12 months their collaboration has also extended to universities, having recently worked with Ghent University and other EU partners to develop several point-of-care devices, which will provide widescale testing for traditionally tricky to diagnose diseases, in remote villages across the globe. This has spawned a whole new instrumentation division for the company, with focus on microfluidics and small-scale image analysis to miniaturise traditionally complex, large-scale processes.

Reflecting on last year’s award win, Tom, who accepted the accolade said:

“We had been NEPIC members for around four years before we entered the awards, we did it on the whim and didn’t expect to win up against the calibre of applicants throughout the region.

“We were shocked but delighted to win the award. It was a fantastic way for us to promote our name across the wider North East process industry, and it was great to receive recognition for the people involved, as our success has definitely been a team effort. If there’s businesses out there who are thinking of entering, I’d say just do it, it’s certainly been a highlight for us.”

Our Annual Industry Awards celebrating 20 years of NEPIC will take place at Hardwick Hall on 28 March 2025, where we have 10 categories you can enter. Deadline for entry is 31 December 2024, to submit an entry visit: nepic.co.uk/awards-categories/

To get involved in this exciting new chapter for Labman, you can view all their open roles here: https://labmanautomation.com/careers