About
Fifty years of making things that move fluid
Founded in 1974 in Bermondsey. 340 people across three English sites. Still privately owned, still making the same category of thing, and still arguing about it.
How we got here
ACME Systems was founded in 1974 by two engineers who had been making pump spares in a railway arch and decided they could make the pumps as well. The Bermondsey workshop turned out centrifugal units for London breweries and, before long, for the water boards.
James Whitford’s father bought the business in 1979. He moved manufacturing to Aston in 1988 when the Bermondsey site could no longer take a delivery lorry, kept the London address for the head office, and started the habit of building the actuator as well as the valve — which is why our valves still arrive working rather than in two boxes.
Instrumentation followed in the 1990s and panel building in the 2000s, each added because a customer asked us to solve a whole problem rather than sell them a part of one. Wakefield came in 2021 with the acquisition of a panel builder we had subcontracted to for years. We are 340 people now, and we still make one category of thing.
What we believe about it
- Say what it will not do
- Every range on this site has a paragraph explaining what it is not for. That costs us occasional orders and saves us the ones that would have gone wrong.
- Build the whole assembly
- A valve and an actuator that have never met before are a commissioning problem waiting to happen. We fit, stroke and test them together before they leave.
- A date is a promise
- We quote lead times as ranges because that is honest, and then we hit them. A schedule nobody believes is worse than no schedule at all.
- Keep the catalogue small
- We would rather make a narrow range properly and hold the spares for twenty years than list everything and support none of it.
- Manufacturing since
- 1974Manufacturing sinceFifty years this year
- People
- 340PeopleAcross three English sites
- Units shipped a year
- 4,000+Units shipped a yearBuilt to order and to stock
- Countries served
- 38Countries servedDirect and through distribution
Leadership
Who runs the company
Five people. Between them they have been here for a combined seventy-odd years, which is either continuity or stubbornness depending on the day.
James Whitford
Managing Director
With ACME since 1991
Joined the drawing office in 1991 and has run the company since 2009 — the second generation of his family to do so, his father having bought the Bermondsey works from its founders in 1979. He still signs off every capital purchase over £25,000 personally, which the board has stopped trying to talk him out of.
Leeroy Jenkins
Operations Director
With ACME since 2016
Owns manufacturing, supply chain and the three-site production plan. Came from automotive tier-one supply, where he learned that a schedule nobody believes is worse than no schedule at all. He is the reason ACME quotes lead times as ranges and then hits them, and the internal sponsor of the ERP replacement programme.
Emma Carrington
Finance Director
With ACME since 2013
Qualified in practice, spent nine years in manufacturing finance before joining. She rebuilt ACME’s costing model in 2015 after establishing that the previous one had been under-recovering overhead on the actuator range for most of a decade. Sceptical of any business case whose benefits start in year three.
Ronald Pickering
Commercial Manager
With ACME since 2004
Twenty years on the commercial desk and the first voice most customers hear. Owns quotations, order intake and the customer relationships that came with them — several of which he has held since before the Wakefield site existed. If you have ever been told a delivery date by ACME and it was met, that was Ronald deciding what to promise.
Raj Patel
IT Lead
With ACME since 2019
One of two people keeping a 1990s ERP, a modern network and three sites of shop-floor hardware talking to each other. He has documented more of the legacy system than its own vendor ever did, and holds the unenviable knowledge of exactly which integrations will break on the day it is switched off.
And the other 335
This page shows the people a customer or a supplier actually deals with. The rest of the company is:
- Machinists, fabricators, welders and assembly
- Panel builders and test engineers
- Stores, dispatch and transport
- Sales, technical support and the service desk
- Quality, finance, IT and people
Split 55 at London, 215 at Birmingham, 70 at Wakefield.
Working here
We take on apprentices every September at Aston and Wakefield, and we hire experienced machinists, panel wirers and test engineers whenever we can find them. There is no jobs board — write to the commercial desk and it will reach the right person.