Guardtech Cleanrooms shares how to meet the needs of a diverse market

After restructuring its business, Guardtech Cleanrooms explains how it is set up so all of its clients’ controlled environment needs are catered for.

“It’s about growth, it’s about opportunity and it’s about delivering the best possible service to all our different types of clients in the diverse range of industries we cover. Five distinct divisions all delivering a five-star service.”

Commercial director Mark Wheeler has seen a lot of change over the past few years in the cleanroom design & build sector.

Even during a devastating pandemic, his team and the business have found a way to find a way to grow and develop, and the industry has found a way to continue to thrive.

With that, Mr Wheeler and his firm, Guardtech Cleanrooms, have launched the Guardtech Group, which will now act as the umbrella company for five businesses, each contributing to an extensive portfolio of cleanroom-related products and services.

Guardtech Cleanrooms will now cater specifically for the modular cleanroom market, while CleanCube Mobile Cleanrooms will continue to provide portable solutions for business all over the world.

Isopod Rapid Cleanrooms will offer a quicker, more flexible and cost-effective alternative – including the option for ‘flat-pack’ delivery and self-assembly installation.

There will be a new addition at some point in 2022, with Isoblok Pre-Fab Cleanrooms focusing on pre-configured ‘plug and play’ cleanroom units and pods constructed offsite.

The company has acquired controlled environment design & build firm Cleanroom Solutions, which will continue to specialise in larger turnkey construction projects under the new Guardtech Group banner.

Wheeler said: “They’d been a ‘friendly competitor’ of ours for many years and we always respected their core values – culturally the two businesses really fit. The relationship started out as us working together, but the idea of an acquisition seemed to make sense as we’re so closely aligned – it strengthens both brands.”

Mr Wheeler explains how Guardtech has grown “organically” over the past 20 years – and in that time, particularly recent years, product development and innovation had become core tenets of the firm’s philosophy.

“Those innovations have taken on a life of their own,” he adds, “developing in a way that they’ve become big enough to support their own divisions. We felt that this restructure was the clearest route to show our customers that there is a distinct outline in the way each element of the Group is run, yet with some central themes. These derive from our ‘GUARD Charter’ – the overall ethos of the Group – which focuses our minds to Guide, Adapt, Understand, Respond and Deliver the best possible service for our clients.”

What does this mean for medtech?

These developments are set to have a huge impact in how the Guardtech Group, and its subsidiary companies, will serve the medtech market over the coming years.

Guardtech Cleanrooms has served clients in the sector over the past 20 years, including the likes of Zimmer Biomet, SFM and Contamac.

Wheeler believes that by restructuring the different elements of the Guardtech Group into more defined, customer-specific entities, it will give them the best opportunity to serve their diverse client base more effectively than ever before.

“In terms of the medtech market specifically, this move gives us the platform to cater for any size client with any type of application,” he continues. “With CleanCube, our mobile cleanroom solution, units are being used by medical device manufacturers all over the world who didn’t have the space in their existing site to continue their operation – some are literally in car parks, offering users a cleanroom or laboratory on a site where they simply weren’t able to build something more substantial.

“Our Isopod Rapid Cleanrooms are being deployed by a number of R&D applications and companies looking for proof of concept, as well as small-scale manufacturing, testing and niche product batches.”

The acquisition of Cleanroom Solutions allows the Guardtech Group to expand its more complex turnkey construction projects for medtech companies, with the company’s previous clients including the likes of ApaTech, ClearLab, Leica, Lombard Medical, Oclaro Technology, Stanmore Implants and Sterimedix.

But the Group’s biggest and most fruitful area of business, in regard to medtech specifically, has been modular cleanroom construction, with a list of clients including UltraVision, NCC, NES, Wesley Coe and, recently, the likes of BioPharma Dynamics and GA Health in Ireland, where they worked with NSP Expert Lab Solutions.

Building for the future 

Despite the restructure, the key elements of a Guardtech project will always remain the same.

“Across all the divisions, our approach is consistent,” says Mr Wheeler. “Client-focused problem-solving. With any of the business, we’re always looking to deliver all of the values that the GUARD charter embodies. This is the same for medtech as it is for any industry we might serve.

“We’re tackling different types of construction using the same quality standpoint and intellectual property. We wanted to compete with what was out there in the market without giving up the quality mark that’s a key component of our heritage modular builds. 

“It was vital to us that Isopod and CleanCube enhanced the brand and did nothing to compromise it. The focus is on quality – we simply aren’t prepared to risk what we’ve established over 20 years of building quality cleanrooms.”

In the near future, Guardtech will turn some of its focus to developing its latest product group – Isoblok Pre-Fab Cleanrooms.

Mr Wheeler says the guiding principle of this move is to provide a quality product for use in territories outside the UK which bear the same hallmarks of quality for those being used for applications on these shores.

“The Medical Device industry is growing at a rapid pace domestically and abroad, and we’re keen to apply our design philosophies to deliver a product that can be built by our own teams in the UK and shipped worldwide,” he adds. “The idea is to offer a high-quality product in territories where suppliers and providers are sparse – we can help improve the quality of applications in other territories, benefitting them and us. As part of this exercise, we recently donated a CleanCube mobile laboratory to the Ugandan Army (the Uganda People’s Defence Force) to help with the vaccine rollout there.”

With a pandemic that continues to cause chaos and many other tests and difficulties on the horizon, it won’t be plain sailing for the cleanroom industry and beyond, but the Guardtech Group feels it can deliver a five-star service, whatever new challenges come its way.