Over the last 25 years Bender UK has grown its market share, increased its number of employees and achieved tens of millions in revenue annually.

However, despite being perhaps one of Cumbria’s biggest SME success stories, managing director Gareth Brunton and the team believe they still need to do more to make people aware of the business and what it does.

In order to do this, Bender UK has unveiled a new customer showcase area at its Ulverston headquarters - known as Suite 97 - complete with a cutting-edge demonstration operating theatre and intensive care unit, as well as a “wonder wall” showcasing the many sectors and applications for its equipment.

“Not enough people know about Bender and that is one of the reasons that we've invested so heavily in this suite and why we want to bring people here,” says Gareth.

Bender UK is part of the Bender Group, which employs over 1,200 people worldwide, with representation in over 100 countries.

Walther Hans Bender founded the business over 75 years ago, in Grünberg, Hessen, Germany. In very simple terms, the company makes solutions that monitor, alarm, and maintain critical power systems to provide advanced warning of electrical failure and to keep systems running in the event of an outage.

Its systems can be found in myriad sectors including healthcare, rail, oil and gas, data centres, maritime, electrical vehicle charging and renewable energy.

The Bender family initially served the UK market via a company in London, which was followed by a move to Barrow when Bender UK was established in 1997.

It is now based in a purpose-built facility on Low Mill Business Park.

The company’s growth was given a boost in 2004 when a change in healthcare standards in the UK put much more demand on the resilience of power networks in hospitals, creating an opportunity for Bender UK to expand its reach into the sector.

It began installing its equipment in hospitals across the UK and Ireland and growing its team accordingly to cover commissioning, service and maintenance.

Today its team of 130 is spread across the UK and Ireland, with over 50 based in Cumbria, and it is on track to generate revenue of around £40m by the end of this year.

The new suite is being used for both demonstration and training purposes for existing and potential customers.

It incorporates a large meeting room for hosting guests, complete with a balcony, which is also available for use by the local community.

(Image: Bender UK)

Bender UK has designed its equipment to integrate with suppliers of state-of-the-art hardware such as operating theatre lamps and pendants - powered columns which are suspended from the ceiling around a patient’s bed and can be used for multiple clinical purposes.

In the operating theatre surgeons can add cameras to the operating lights to record surgery or stream it in real time to colleagues or students.

Bender UK also produces a digital touchscreen operating theatre control and alarm panel which can alter the lighting, temperature and humidity in the room. It also alerts the medical team if there are any issues with systems such as ultra clean ventilation units which ensure the air is clear for certain procedures.

This is in addition to supplying operating tables themselves, which can be configured in a dizzying range of ways to facilitate different types of operations.

Across the corridor from the healthcare area, the “wonder wall” offers a graphical representation of the different sectors which use Bender UK’s equipment.

This includes the oil and gas sector where it monitors the electrical supply to rigs, as well as that being used to run processes such as drilling.

Its applications are also used to maintain and monitor power to remotely operated vehicles on the seabed, as well as to cranes or submarines working in ports.

On dry land Network Rail uses its equipment in all of its signal power infrastructure to warn when a fault is going to happen and identify where it is located if one does occur.

(Image: Bender UK)

Yet more applications can be found in energy production, for example in hazardous locations in the nuclear industry where remote monitoring is safer than sending a human being to work in an environment directly.

Bender products are also used in renewable energy infrastructure or for power distribution in electrical vehicle charging and to maintain critical power supplies to data centres and manufacturers.

It is also doing more work in the field of energy monitoring, enabling companies to see how much energy they are using, and when and where, helping them to increase efficiency and hit environmental targets.

Gareth says he hopes the new facility can help Bender UK continue to grow in the coming years.

"We want to be the leader in safe, smart, sustainable energy solutions across our chosen markets by 2030," says Gareth. 

"We want to continue pushing boundaries and striving for excellence.

“We want all of our customers to have an experience with Bender that they don't forget and keep coming back to us because that's what's going to allow us to grow and continue to have this amazing success story.”