The move into industrial machine vision has been a decidedly positive one for Shelton Vision. The family-owned firm, based at Kibworth in Leicestershire, turne' 40 this year and is continuing to expand having focused the business on providing equipment for rapid, automated scanning of all manner of materials - but mainly fabrics - for defects. While chief executive Mark Shelton claims the best measure of success is merely continued existence in an industry that has largely gone abroad, he could equally point to the firm running at full capacity, its current recruitment drive or it turnover per worker, which has increased "by a factor of around five", he says, since embracing the technology in the 1990s. "We started out in 1971 producing traditional textile equipment, including fabric measuring and inspection machines for manual operation. In the early 1990s v got involved in two government-sponsorec research projects involving machine vision in the textile industry," says Shelton. This put the company at odds with the rest of industry, which was mainly preparing to take flight at the time, but demonstrated the value of adopting technology to diversify away from textiles, although subsequently that focus has returned.
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