Brompton Bicycle is “effecting cultural change” through its role in encouraging cycling in cities and improving people’s lives, according to its chief executive.

Will Butler-Adams says the company’s folding bikes – which can be packed into a small space and carried on public transport – have helped in “making cycling more attractive and comfortable” in cities.

“Travelling by bike is positive for many reasons – it improves people’s mental and physical health and encourages people to move away from using cars and causing pollution. We are helping to bring about a cultural change.”

The company – with sales of about £43m in the year to March 2019, roughly three-quarters of where are exported – has become one of the few UK manufacturers to have established a global reputation in a major consumer industry.

While Brompton is far from being the only folding bike manufacturer, the company is regarded as one of the market leaders. Others with a strong presence include Dahon and Pacific Cycle (which produces the Schwinn brand) in the US and Hummingbird, another UK business.

With 350 employees mainly in a factory in west London, Brompton is one of the best examples of a manufacturing business offering attractive job opportunities for young people, an area of focus for Made Here Now.

Ricky Do of BikeFolded, a US-based website, says of Brompton: ” I haven’t found another manufacturer so passionate about making a flexible transport solution for city dwellers and travellers. While other manufacturers are struggling to survive and many stopped making folding bikes, I strongly believe Brompton will stay in the business for a long time, simply because they put their heart into their products.”

The bike maker’s London plant can make 100,000 bikes a year – but could run out of space in the 2020s.

Butler-Adams says the company’s impact has been most marked in London – where Brompton has sold 130,000 bikes since its inception – and has been noticeable also in Brussels and Barcelona.

“But we still have a long way to go. While we have a significant presence in about 45 cities around the world, we sell only about 50,000 bikes a year – which is pathetic given the potential for this mode of transport.”

The company bases its bikes on designs devised over the past 30 years for joining about 1,200 metal and plastic parts, most of which are unique to the Brompton bike.

Butler-Adams says the company has made a “solid start” in developing a new series of foldable electric bikes, in a development with the Formula One racing team Williams. About 10 per cent of the company’s planned bike output of bikes in 2019 will be electric models.

Brompton’s factory has the capacity to make 100,000 bikes a year. Assuming it can continue its increase output at 15 per cent a year, the company will run out of space within the next decade, which explains why Butler-Adams has started to look at options for a second plant.

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In a cavernous plant on the outskirts of Coventry, a massive bet is being placed about the sort of vehicles that will be trundling around cities and along motorways over the next 30 years. The factory is the result of a £325m investment by a big Chinese automotive group and adds up to one of the boldest efforts in the UK to create a new generation of electric cars.

The site is run by London Electric Vehicle Company, a UK-based company owned by Geely, a fast expanding group controlled by the leading Chinese entrepreneur Li Shufu – who is known for his spare-time hobby writing poetry, as well as for a relentlessly global approach.

A key part of Li’s plans for LEVC is to make the Coventry plant a centre for development of new types of electric car, aided by recruitment of technical specialists, many of whom are likely to start at LEVC either as apprentices or engineering graduates.

The  investment stands out against the decision by Sir James Dyson, one of Britain’s best known entrepreneurs ,to spurn the idea of starting an electric car plant in the UK, choosing Singapore.

Among the 750 employees at the site – which opened in 2017 – is Pauline Dumont, one of the factory’s 200 development engineers. The 26-year-old Belgian, pictured at the start of this story,  joined LEVC in 2015 after finishing a postgraduate degree in automotive engineering at Cranfield University.

“I was excited at coming to work here – the job gives me the chance to help create a completely new product starting from zero,” says Dumont. “It’s been great being part of a team doing something special. I feel I have learned a massive amount in a short time.”

Electric cars could change the shape of  21st century motoring 

The first products from the factory are a new series of electric black cabs for London, which in time will replace the diesel-powered taxis that form a big part of the London street scene, but which will be gradually replaced by less environmentally intrusive new models. The LEVC-produced vehicle has been expressly designed to fit in with the capital’s increasingly onerous clean-air regulations.

Diesel vehicles are regarded particularly negatively because of their strong association with pollution and widespread health problems. Over the next decade, it appears that, worldwide, increasing numbers of vehicles will be based around electric propulsion instead of petrol and diesel engines — Britain and France have already said that new cars sold in their countries must be fully electric by 2040.

Volvo, the Swedish company that Geely bought in 2010 as part of a big international push, says that from 2019, it will no longer launch models powered only by internal combustion engines and all its vehicles will be hybrid or electric.

As for Geely’s efforts in the UK, it formed a joint venture with Manganese Bronze in 2007, and took a 20 per cent stake in the business. After the full acquisition and the development of its electric propulsion plans, Geely renamed the business LEVC.

Pointedly it dropped any references to taxis in the title, signalling its ambitions. Geely plans to ramp up production from Coventry to 20,000 vehicles a year by 2020. The output will comprise not just taxis but other sorts of electric cars aimed at markets outside Britain.

Steve Fitter, pictured below, assembly manager at the Coventry factory, who started at Manganese Bronze in 2000, says the Chinese investment has been “hugely welcome”. The Chinese owners have, he says, “a broader view of the world” than the previous top management at Manganese Bronze.

Alluding to the graduate engineers and apprentices at the factory, Fitter says: “We want to embed them into the company’s development programme. We want to grow a new workforce that will create a product cycle of new vehicles.”

The initial product from the factory – the London taxi – is strictly speaking a hybrid as it combines a lithium-ion battery with a petrol engine. That gives the vehicle the ability to travel for about 70 miles purely under electric power, or a total of about 370 miles when in hybrid mode and fuelled also by petrol.

Among the novel techniques being pioneered at the plant is extensive use of plastic- based composite panels that feature in much of the vehicle’s body, in place of the more orthodox steel. The panels are fixed to the car’s frame – made from aluminium, again rather than steel – through glueing rather than the normal welding process. Basing the structure of the car on plastics and aluminium leads to a less weighty body, offsetting the effect of the heavy battery, helping to reduce energy use when on the road.

A key partner in this part of the development is Novelis, the US-based aluminium producer owned by the Indian industrial group Hindalco. Novelis has a partnership with LEVC under which it supplies the aluminium in the body from a plant in Germany. Steve Fisher, chief executive of Novelis, told Made Here Now the relationship had led to some “unique insights” for both companies that could help with the development of more vehicle models in the future with similar characteristics.

Watching from the sidelines as the Geely plans for Coventry have taken shape is Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, doyen of the UK manufacturing scene who is the chairman and founder of Warwick Manufacturing Group, a high-profile part of the University of Warwick that is based in Coventry. It was Bhattacharyya who invited the Geely chairman Li to the city in the mid- to late-2000s, after previously meeting him in Beijing.

Lord Bhattacharyya – chairman of Warwick Manufacturing Group – introduced Geely’s chairman Li Shufu to Coventry and paved the way for the new investment. The two men are shown below.

Bhattacharyya says: “I’m interested in cars and so is Li Shufu – so it seemed natural he’d like to visit Coventry [a historic centre for UK vehicle production]. He wasn’t all that interested in taxis – taxis were taxis, and no one bothered with them – but then Manganese Bronze came to his attention and he got involved with the company.”

Bhattacharyya says Geely’s plans for Coventry are “very encouraging”. He describes Li – who has humble roots and started out in business by buying an old camera to photograph tourists at beauty spots – as a “man with ideas and a vision of the future”.

“I’ve always said that the UK car industry can do well under the right sort of leadership and what Geely is doing in Coventry bears this out,” Bhattacharyya adds.

by Peter Marsh

A version of this article appears in MadeHereNow.com. Note: Lord Bhattacharyya has died since the article was published. 

 

An innovative UK company is rethinking the production of one of the world’s most common industrial products, with its formation aided by an unusual business network focused on technology and manufacturing.

The Bessemer Society brings together “fantastic people who have fantastic opportunities and are facing similar challenges” according to Ian Balchin, a business veteran who is among its members.

The group assists the growth of companies in “hardtech” areas ranging from medical equipment to green energy. These are fields in which Britain generally has good skills and knowhow but where companies have often struggled to become established globally, due to lack of finance or high-calibre management.

Assuming the growth problems can be overcome, businesses in novel areas of manufacturing appear to offer young people attractive employment possibilities. [Note this article originally appeared in 2019.}

The new UK company that Bessemer helped spawn is Q5D Technology. The Bristol-based enterprise is attempting to disrupt the business of making wiring harnesses – dense collections of cables made every year in their tens of millions to join up components in electrical machines from cars to computers. Part of an early version of a Q5D machine is pictured at the start of this article and below.

 

Rather than use human labour plus limited amounts of automation to thread cables into the required patterns, the wiring would be imprinted directly into the plastic or metal of the machines. This would make possible more varied and complex harness designs, increase production speed and cut costs.

Q5D was started after a conversation at a Bessemer meeting by executives from two existing companies. “[We] identified that if we combined some of our respective knowledge and intellectual property, we could come up with something pretty unique,” says Janet Donovan, chief financial officer at M-Solv, an electronics processing business. In the photograph below, an operator at M-Solv checks on components used inside the company’s machines.

The other partner is CEL UK which makes automation equipment. The new ideas at the heart of Q5D’s technologies are in fields including 3D printing, robotics, new materials and control software.

A central theme to Bessemer is that by discussing common issues, individuals can learn from each other and that this should improve their chances of business success. “I’ve made [through Bessemer meetings] a lot of contacts which have led to business relationships. It is a very effective networking forum for people of a common persuasion,” says Nigel Salter of Badger Projects, an innovation management company.

Others among the society’s 100-strong membership say they gain from sounding out new ideas or capturing insights from others. “It’s good to have other like-minded people that you can discuss things with,” says Jill Shaw, chief executive of Kubos Semiconductor.

Alex Stewart, an unassuming Cambridge-based writer and analyst who started the society and is its “convenor”, says he feels it is important to make meetings as informal as possible to encourage discussion. The group he says unites people from different industries but who show similar qualities of “determination, perseverance and entrepreneurship”.

Among the members is 28-year-old Henrik Hagemann, co-founder of Customem, a start-up developing biological granulates to absorb hazardous material and used in pollution control. Alex Schey, 31, runs Vantage Power, a fledging business developing electrical power transmissions for cars.

A much bigger company also represented in the membership is Hexadex, which makes equipment for cleaning up vehicle exhausts and has annual sales of around £100m.

Meetings usually take place over dinner in towns around Britain and include speakers from outside the group. These have come from some of the well-known businesses with which Bessemer has links, among them Rolls-Royce, Tata Steel and Renishaw. The society is named after Sir Henry Bessemer, the Victorian inventor and industrialist who paved the way to mass production of steel and whose image is at the end of this story.

Jonathan Watkins, a seasoned entrepreneur who is chief executive of Coventry-based Impression Technologies, which makes lightweight automotive parts, says he has through the group picked up new ideas on topics such as “[dealing with] China, business models, scale up issues, talent [retention and recruitment] and funding ”. The picture below shows part of Impression Technologies’ factory making components for the Aston Martin carmaker.

According to Stewart, the strength of the companies making up the society’s membership is “almost always the unique feature of their technology”. A weakness is that sometimes “the technology can [in the mind of the entrepreneur] take centre stage ahead of what the customer is looking for.

“A problem for an engineer is to get into the head of a customer, especially a commercial customer. The operational knowledge and experience in the Bessemer Society of members who have learnt this lesson the hard way can therefore be a benefit for others.”

 

Bessemer skills range from clever chemistry to farm robotics

The Bessemer society’s biggest success story to date has been that of Harry Destecroix, a 32-year-old biotechnologist and co-founder of Ziylo, a company paving the way to make new forms of insulin for diabetics.

In 2018 Ziylo was bought by Novo Nordisk, a big Danish pharmaceutical company, in a deal worth potentially more than £600m, with the pay-out linked to scientific and commercial milestones.

Ziylo is a spinout from the University of Bristol which designed synthetic molecules that bind the glucose in blood. Novo Nordisk thinks Ziylo’s technology could help it to create new types of “glucose responsive insulins” that could prevent hypoglycaemia.

The condition is caused by a dangerous fall in blood glucose levels. It can be triggered by incorrectly managed insulin therapy.

Destecroix told a Bessemer meeting that behind Ziylo’s success was a determination to focus on disciplines in which it had proven competence, rather than risk being side-tracked. “We concentrated on understanding glucose chemistry – we didn’t want to move off into other areas such as [drug delivery] devices.”

Mike Karim, chief executive of Oxford Endovascular, is also in a medical field – making tiny metallic tubes for inserting into the blood vessels of people who have had brain aneurysms. Nova Extraction – also represented in the society – is building machines to extract nutrients from plants where the technology could be useful to the fragrance and flavourings industry.

In a different field of materials, Cambridge-based Paragraf says it has discovered an economical way to make “wonder material” graphene – carbon made in layers just one atom thick that could have uses in many industries including energy, industrial processing and electronics.

Homing in on a topical field, Recycling Technologies has engineered a machine to convert hard-to-recycle plastic waste such as shopping bags and crisp packets into fuel oil. It has started trials with supermarket chain Tesco to test out the ideas.

Other Bessemer members come from Libertine, a company based in Sheffield producing components for high-efficiency electrical machines; Ibex Automation, a maker of agricultural robots; Polysolar, which makes solar glass for building exteriors to create energy from the sun; and Innova Designs, a pioneer in body tracking monitors for checking on people doing dangerous jobs such as soldiers and firefighters.

This article appeared in Made Here Now on May 30 2019

 

The death of Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya – founder and chairman of Warwick Manufacturing Group – has robbed the UK of a charismatic leader who has played a key role in the reawakening of British manufacturing in recent years.

Lord Bhattacharyya built up Warwick Manufacturing Group into one of the world’s most influential applied research centres. He is pictured above with Ratan Tata, former chairman of the Indian industry group Tata, and among the many global business leaders who he counted as collaborators and friends.

Combining the wiles of a politician with the panache of a showman, the India-born peer conveyed globally through his teaching organisation powerful new ideas on how to succeed in 21st century industry. [Note this article dates to 2019 – when Bhattacharyya died.]

Asked almost 20 years ago about the strategies manufacturers should adopt to win out Bhattacharyya answered: “They should develop their skills, learn to transfer technology, and formulate an international strategy. Then they have a chance.”

Other principles that Bhattacharyya set out stress the importance of collaboration. “Just as a brain surgeon could never perform in isolation, a top manufacturing engineer needs a team of people,” was one Bhattacharyya aside.

Aided by guidelines established by Bhattacharyya, successive UK governments have done more to recognise the role of manufacturing as an economic lever, a view enshrined in the UK’s industrial strategy, unveiled in 2017. Bhattacharyya spent several years advising Nelson Mandela on an industrial policy for South Africa after apartheid.

Bhattacharyya’s biggest legacy is WMG, which he set up in 1980 as part of the University of Warwick. WMG is one of the world’s foremost manufacturing research and teaching groups with 600 staff and an annual turnover of £200m.

Development work at Warwick Manufacturing spreads across topics from electronics to composites materials, usually organised with an industrial partner

Sir Vince Cable, industry secretary during the 2010-15 Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, said Bhattacharyya was “a giant of British manufacturing…He believed passionately in the value of manufacturing and practised what he preached.”

Sir Richard Lambert, a former director general of the Confederation of British Industry and former chancellor of Warwick University, said:” I first met Lord Bhattacharyya in London back in the 1980s. He was dropping lots of names, and talking very big, and I couldn’t quite believe he was for real. So I went up to see him at WMG – and was completely blown away by what I found.

“The bosses of half the country’s biggest engineering companies were sitting around his department in their cardigans, drinking coffee and being absolutely inspired by what he was saying. Namely, that they could dramatically up their game if they combined intellectual rigour with commercial acumen. He spoke a language that I hadn’t heard in the UK before, and I thought he was inspirational.”

The Warwick guru, said Lambert, showed through his achievements that “excellence was both possible and necessary”.

Lord Bhattacharyya had a formidable list of contacts: here he shows Theresa May and  Philip Hammond (in the days when they were UK prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer) around Warwick Manufacturing Group’s HQ.

On the international front, Bhattacharyya was particularly effective in encouraging the big Indian industrial group, Tata, to invest in the UK, notably through its 2007 move to buy Corus, the steel business that was formerly part of British Steel, and its acquisition a year later of the Jaguar Land Rover car company.

Prior to the JLR deal, Ratan Tata, then Tata’s chairman, was all set to invest in Germany as part of a global automotive industry expansion. That was until Bhattacharyya invited him to the UK to show what British vehicle engineering was capable of.

Tata said Lord Bhattacharyya played “a significant role in enhancing the visibility of high-technology manufacturing enterprises in the UK”. Ralf Speth, JLR’s chief executive, said Bhattacharyya had been “remarkable and inspirational”.

Apart from Tata, Bhattacharyya’s ideas had a big impact on other companies in India – where WMG has an impressive reputation.

Baba Kalyani, chairman of Bharat Forge, a big India-based maker of forgings with plants in the US, France and Germany, said Bhattacharyya “was always full of ideas and self-confidence…He was a guru to many Indian industrialists and business houses”.

While generally exhibiting charm and good humour, Bhattacharyya could in private be scathing about individuals in business or government who he reckoned weren’t up to the job.

He also directed scorn at those UK companies that in his opinion, failed to invest enough of their own cash in research and development, preferring to lobby for government handouts. In UK industry, he liked to say, there was no shortage of good engineers “but a lack of leadership”.

Bhattacharyya had a guileful side. This was shown when, ahead of Tata’s 2007 move to buy Corus, journalists picked up rumours that the two companies might be talking.

Anxious to head off stories that might jeopardise the deal, Bhattacharyya dismissed the conjecture as “bar talk”. For Bhattacharyya, such conversations were all part of an effort to direct the progress of UK manufacturing in in a positive direction.

Bhattacharyya – who continued as the chairman and driving force of WMG until his death – was part of a Bangalore family which had made its money in tea and steel. In his later life years he never appeared short of money and liked to be transported around in a vehicle from his fleet of UK-made Range Rovers.

Enthused by the career possibilities in production, the young Bhattacharyya arrived in Britain in 1960. Initially, he found most of the food so inedible that he lived for several days on Cadbury’s chocolate.

A year later he enrolled as an engineering apprentice at a London factory run by Lucas Industries, at that time a big maker of automotive components. (Later, Bhattacharyya bought a substantial house in Birmingham that had once been the home of Joseph Lucas, the company’s founder, and lived in it until he died

“I got into engineering because in those days this was considered sexy,” Bhattacharyya told me in 2000. “And British manufacturing was something that when I was young in India we all looked up to.”

But it did not take long for him to discover the sector’s shortcomings. “Although there were a few golden nuggets, British management (in the 1960s) lacked intellectual horsepower. The understanding of the global environment and world politics was pretty well zilch.”

Bhattacharyya’s desire to improve matters led to the creation of WMG – designed around the then unfamiliar concept in Britain of industry and academics working together. Today, WMG says it has “strong relationships” with 1,000 companies globally and has trained 35,000 students from 75 countries.

Bhattacharyya was a strong supporter of Made Here Now, set up to improve the image of manufacturing and encourage more people into it. He was a member of the project’s advisory board.

Another company that Bhattacharyya helped to bring to the UK was the big Chinese car maker Geely, owner of two large UK-based industrial businesses, the Lotus sports car company and LEVC, a pioneering producer of electric vehicles.

Carl-Peter Forster, LEVC chairman and a non-executive director at Geely, said Bhattacharyya will be remembered as “someone who made things happen”.

Lessons from a global guru

Lord Bhattacharyya has left behind numerous ideas and maxims that impart useful nuggets of insight into how modern manufacturing works.

“If you want to be a good manufacturer, you must recognise you can never be an expert in everything,” was a typical remark. “You are part of a broad manufacturing economy. You need to be part of a connected supply chain involving both manufacturing in its narrowest sense [involving physical production] and access to services and other things like software and new materials.”

Applying this dictum more specifically, Bhattacharyya said: “To make a success [for instance] of an electric car you will need a lot of technology that will almost certainly be supplied by someone else. You need connections and you need guidance.”

Venu Srinivasan is one noted industrialist who says he owes a lot to Bhattacharyya’s teaching and ideas.

In 1975 Srivinisan, chairman of TVS, a large Indian industrial group, spent a year as an apprentice in the UK at Lucas Industries, the British car parts maker where Bhattacharyya worked as a production engineer. The older man was assigned to Srinivasan as a mentor.

“Since the mid-1980s, when TVS was a regional moped company, [Kumar] has guided our vision and thinking to expand and grow into a company with a global scale and footprint,” Srivinasan says.

“Kumar guided our turnaround in the 1990s by implementing excellence in manufacturing and a lean supply chain. His vision inspired us to learn, grow and educate our people in cutting edge practices from around the world.”

On many topics, Bhattacharya had a strong opinion.

Definitions of industry: “Manufacturing is the production of goods, plus the creative services that go into them. In the past we [in Britain] have been to blame for defining manufacturing too narrowly.”

The UK without a strong manufacturing sector: “We would be heading for Doomsday. We are not gods; we cannot live on thin air, or just by using mobile phones.”

Manufactured products: “All successful products are global.”

Thoughts about Britain: “The UK is not a mass country. People have such individualistic attitudes. Getting people in Britain to work together is always fraught.”

Sir James Dyson [the technology entrepreneur]: “Dyson is good but there’s only one of him. We need more people like him.”

Brexit: “I’m worried but I think we will have a soft Brexit. Common sense will prevail.”

 

This article first appeared in Made Here Now on March 19 2019

The article examines five ways UK manufacturers are seeking to expand, despite the difficulties caused by the country’s European Union exit. The five strategies are: capitalising on UK engineering, reshoring, boosting trans-Atlantic trade, improving local supply chains and focusing on product strengths. A version of this article appeared in Made Here Now in 2019. It has not been updated.

Capitalising on UK engineering: Swedish car innovator homes in on Britain

An electric car start-up from Sweden has shrugged off worries about Brexit by choosing Britain for its main global factory, citing the country’s strengths in specialist engineering and availability of high-quality recruits. Some of the company’s UK staff are in the picture above.

Lewis Horne, the 34-year-old chief executive of Uniti, says he has been influenced by the UK’s leading position in the engineering needed for high-performance cars, especially lightweight materials. “The Brits invented production of composites [blends of materials useful in cutting vehicle weight],” says Horne, who started Uniti in 2016.

Nile Henry is enthusiastic about what the Create Education training group has done for his organisation. “It’s had a transformational impact,” says Henry, chief executive of the Blair Project, which aims to inspire the next generation of engineers through making and racing electric go-karts.

Henry is pictured (right) in the photo, next to the Blair project’s Marilyn Comrie. Also shown are royal visitor Prince Harry and  Paul Croft and Michelle Chatterley of the Create Education training agency.

Now, Create Education – based in Chorley near Manchester and which organises workshops for 3D printing throughout the UK – is planning a big extension in its activity. It intends to double in each of the next two years the number of courses it runs, to reach a total of up to 200 a year. Each course typically involves 15-20 people and lasts one to three days. (This article appeared in Made Here Now in 2019.)

The group is at the centre of a diverse network of people throughout the UK, united by an interest in 3D printing, but with a range of backgrounds and goals. As a result, Create Education has brought together in education ventures a mix of organisations – including businesses, schools and community groups –that might otherwise have remained apart.

Create Education works mainly with teachers and young people. It focuses on 3D printing or additive manufacturing, a fast-moving technology for creating items in short production runs and with potential applications in industries from toys to aerospace.

The central idea is helping young people learn about engineering and technology. That aligns with the goals of Made Here Now, established to highlight innovative manufacturing and encourage more young people to consider this as a career.

“Giving children the chance to try out new thinking with an emerging technology [3D printing] is very valuable in equipping them with the sorts of skills they may need in the future,” says Michelle Chatterley, head of education at Create Education. The group employs seven people including directors, Paul Croft and Alex Mayor.

The emphasis on 3D printing makes sense since the technology – which provides ways of building up complex objects layer by layer relatively quickly – has captured the imagination of many young people. “Many school children find 3D printing hugely inspiring,” says Chatterley.

Also, it can be learned about using cheap desktop machines suited for schools, rather than the expensive and bigger “professional” systems used in industry.

The Blair Project is among the groups with which Create Education has collaborated. With Create Education’s help, in 2016 the Blair Project started using 3D printing and computer-aided design to create its own karts, cutting their cost from £6,000 to £1,000.

Racing karts made from 3D-printed parts are at the centre of programmes organised by the Blair Project, supported by Create Education

The changes enabled the project, named after Henry’s brother, to add a production and design element to its activities in organising kart racing. “They [Create Education] turned us into makers and got us to where we are today,” says Henry. His project often works with children from poor or socially disadvantaged backgrounds who might lack the opportunities to learn about engineering and technology.

Prince Harry has been among those interested in what the Blair Project does. The 34-year-old royal dropped in to the Three Sisters Racing Circuit in Wigan, near Liverpool, in 2016 to talk to people associated with the project, meeting Chatterley and Croft at the same time. Chatterley says of the Blair Project: “We have helped and supported each other.”

Another group to have worked with Create Education is Renishaw, an innovative UK company which is a big maker of specialist measuring probes and related instruments, while also producing its own brand of 3D printing machines. With 3,000 employees in the UK, where it does nearly all its production, it runs an extensive schools programme designed to boost interest among young people in engineering.

Simon Biggs, a former teacher who is Renishaw’s education centre outreach officer, describes Create Education as “a very professional group of people who offer fantastic resources for the teaching community”. He adds: “There do not seem to be many comparable companies to Create, so they continue to be the ‘go to’ education provider for support and help [in 3D printing].”

As well as Renishaw, Create Education organises courses and events in conjunction with other businesses including Autodesk. The big US-based provider of design and manufacturing software was among the participants at a three-day training session for 300 young people organised by Create Education in September 2018. The event was organised with media group TCT at its big 3D printing exhibition in Birmingham, with another collaborator being Bloodhound, a project started by Richard Noble to build a supersonic-speed car.

Children learn about 3D printing at Renishaw’s education centre in Miskin, south Wales

According to Chatterley, interest sparked by such ventures is increasing demand for Create Education’s services. From the 50 or so courses and related events it operated in the year to September 2018, it hopes to push this to 100 in 2019, with the figure possibly doubling again the year afterwards.

Often, she says the most useful way in which Create Education can assist on schools’ projects is to focus on teachers: “However good and enthusiastic teachers are they can sometimes be a barrier to helping children learn – particularly about a new and evolving technology. That’s why it’s important to give teachers the skills they need to help children learn.”

A good example of how some of the projects supported by Create Education can involve a mix of entities is a school’s programme in Plymouth organised by Plymouth Manufacturing Group, a partnership of Plymouth-based business.

The PMG – among the UK’s most active regional industry associations – wanted to boost awareness among local children about career opportunities in engineering.

A good way to do this, it reckoned, was through focusing on 3D printing, in a scheme assisted by Create Education. Also involved were several Plymouth manufacturers and FabLab Plymouth, a digital fabrication facility at Plymouth College of Art. Gemma Selley, a PMG consultant, says Create Education provided “fantastic support”, ensuring that children participating in the scheme gained useful experience.

A key factor in Create Education’s progress is that it supports its education services through a separate venture, selling equipment and services from other companies. These include the Netherlands-based 3D printing machine producer Ultimaker; Printlab, which provides curriculum materials in digital manufacturing; and Filamentive and Innofil3D, two UK-based suppliers of the filament materials used in 3D printing.

Small desktop machines for schools give young people practical experience of modern design and manufacturing

The commercial operations provide income which enables Create Education to cut the cost of courses it runs. It provides some of them for free – an attraction for many schools hit by cuts in education budgets.

Outside the commercial sphere, Create Education has links on training projects with a range of other organisations with wider social aims. These include the Crafts Council, a leading charity for craft-based production; Barclays Eagle Labs, a network of workplaces for entrepreneurs financed by Barclays Bank; and ECraft2Learn, a European Union-wide group backing small ventures in digital fabrication and other novel areas of production.

Additive manufacturing may help tutor tomorrow’s engineers

Small community-based “maker workshops” with which it has worked include FabLab Sunderland, iForge in Sheffield and MakerNow in Penryn. It has also collaborated with MakerVersity, a London-based group that operates workplaces for manufacturing and tech-based entrepreneurs, and Tech Will Save Us, an unusual operation that makes toys and technology kits for children combining teaching and play.

(The article appeared in Made Here Now originally.)

BAE Systems, the defence company which is among the UK’s biggest manufacturers, has appointed a 23-year-old engineer as “entrepreneur in residence” to help promote a drive to boost collaboration and innovation.

George Edwards  is charged with encouraging other engineers in the business – which makes military hardware from submarines and missiles to warships and jet fighters – to be more open to new ideas from the likes of Microsoft and Amazon as well as small start-ups. The photo above shows the inside of BAE’s submarine factory in Barrow, Cumbria.

While Edwards is just one among the 22,000 engineers and technical staff who work for BAE in Britain, the move indicates how even in big and conservatively managed businesses intriguing new opportunities can open for young people. Made Here Now aims to highlight such possibilities.

A key attraction to BAE of Edwards – and which marks him out from the many young graduates and apprentices in the rest of the business – is that he started his own technology enterprise when he was 17 and still at school. Edwards runs the eight-person Make Sense for roughly half the working week, with the rest spent at BAE.

BAE says it hopes that Edwards’ experience at the start-up can bring an “outsider’s perspective” to developing technical ideas. Edwards says: “I am looking…[at external businesses]…that may have great technology that we [BAE] can use. We could form a link with such companies through partnerships or making an investment.

“My role…entails first identifying businesses where we could form these sorts of ventures and then developing ideas for how the partnership could work.”

Edwards’ appointment has emerged as BAE comes under pressure to make the most of its wide range of technologies and to become more cost-effective in using them in work for its mainly government-owned customers. Defence budgets globally are being squeezed as part of spending constraints.

To help in its technology effort, BAE is a huge provider of engineers and technical staff. In 2018 BAE recruited roughly 500 apprentices and 300 graduates. It has some 2,000 apprentices and 500 graduates in training in the UK – where it employs just over 34,000 people in all disciplines, comprising about 40 per cent of its global workforce.

Nick Cunningham of Agency Partners, an investment research group specialising in aerospace and defence, says that over the next few years BAE is expected to boost its spending on new technologies to give itself more of a competitive edge.

The spending is likely to come in disciplines such as “stealth” systems (hardware and software to make military equipment invisible to radar), autonomous aircraft, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. In all these areas, BAE might find it hard to create new ideas purely with its own resources.

As a result, says Cunningham, bringing in an outsider such as Edwards “could be one part of the effort to help the company to take on new thinking and move ahead of rivals”.

The appointment has been orchestrated by Nigel Whitehead, a long-serving BAE executive who at the start of 2018 started as the company’s first chief technology officer. Whitehead says: “Technology and innovation sit at the heart of our business…attracting and developing diverse talent is vitally important to encourage new and innovative ways of working and embrace disruptive and emerging technologies.”

Whitehead’s effort to promote innovation must fit in with BAE’s generally conservative approach. Defence companies are often reluctant to collaborate on technology with non-military businesses on secrecy grounds, as well as special factors related to equipment reliability.

One of the biggest projects BAE has underway is an advanced combat aircraft called Tempest, which would be flown by a pilot or operate autonomously as a sophisticated drone. The vehicle – which could cost as much as £2bn to bring to production and see service in the 2030s – would use new ideas from novel structural materials to “smart” weapons guided by artificial intelligence.

Edwards is working for BAE for three days a week, as part of a 30-strong team engaged in “engineering product management” reporting to Whitehead. The rest of the time he is at Make Sense where he is chief executive.

Make Sense (formerly Gas Sense) concentrates on collecting and analysing data from manufacturing operations and linking the data to the IT systems, for instance, to help connect manufacturing operations with sales and distribution as part of the “internet of things”. Its clients include several big consumer goods makers, such as the US cosmetics group Coty.

According to Nicole Humphrey, founder of Direct Talent Source, a recruitment firm specialising in engineering, many technology businesses are more interested in taking on people such as Edwards with a background that “might not fit into their traditional job profiles” to bring in fresh ideas and facilitate innovation.

Discussing BAE, Edwards says: “Even with some of the world’s leading engineers and technologists within the business, there’s always opportunity to see what other innovative technology companies out there are developing that might be of help. For the world’s pioneering tech leaders you have to look to companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon. These sorts of companies are a key source of innovation and it’s important for us to look to the outside world to find new ideas.”

Part of Edwards’ career path involved a decision while still at school not to go to university. “I knew if I went to university, I’d find it very difficult to run my business as well,” Edwards says. “I love technology and I love business and I love manufacturing. So I decided to concentrate on this.”

Edwards had started Make Sense on the back of ideas while studying design and technology at King’s School, Canterbury, a public boarding school. He says he was “enormously fortunate” to be at a top-rated school with the money to pay for necessary equipment and teachers. Graham Swindley, who taught Edwards, says that at a young age he showed “enthusiasm for solutions that worked and dogged determination to make them work”.

On the wider effort to foster more of an interest in technology and engineering among school children, Edwards says: “I think an enormous amount has been achieved in the past five years in terms of promoting engineering within schools, through companies’ own initiatives…and [government] programmes. People talk a lot more about engineering and manufacturing than they used to which shows that some of the promotional efforts are beginning to take effect.”

(The article appeared in Made Here Now in 2018.)

The 3Cs – code, collaboration and capability – are the keys to separating the winners and losers in global manufacturing.

Code describes the software important in linking networks of products. Collaboration covers the relationships connecting companies with suppliers, developers and users. Capability encompasses employee skills.

The 3Cs grabbed attention at the latest in a series of annual “manufacturing summits” held by the Financial Times. At the latest gathering, held in London in October 2018, the topics for discussion included autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, the internet of things and the challenges of Brexit.

Pictured is a taxi coming off the production line at a UK factory run by Chinese-owned London Electric Vehicle Company.The plant shows how collaboration between different businesses can lead to useful benefits.

First, consider code – the lines of software that act as the “glue” between interlinked machines. The key resource here is data. Every time a manufacturing process takes place, or a finished product interacts with the outside world, an item of data is created.

In the past, most manufacturers have failed either to collect, store or process the data- in many cases they’ve done none of these things.  Now, the position is changing as businesses realise that the data – backed up by the software that keeps track of it and uses the data to make judgements – can help them to improve.

“Everyone [in manufacturing] is a software company – it’s just that some don’t know it yet,” was one phrase heard during the FT conference.

Extracting data from manufacturing processes can help raise revenues and profits 

Driverless cars offer examples of where data and products connect. An autonomous car interacting with other vehicles and objects around it is an illustration of the much discussed “internet of things” – where the things happen to be large, expensive and on wheels.

Sarah-Jane Williams, director of smart mobility at the Ford carmaker,  says people will have to stop thinking about “user-optimised journeys”, and become accustomed to “system optimised journeys” where software takes charge. Ford aims to generate revenues from the software by teaming up with other businesses – such as public authorities or other entities that may evolve to manage driverless cars – which have a part to play in managing the cities of the future.

More prosaically, software and networks are important for many manufacturers that wish to use their production machines more effectively. For instance, a company operating machine tools can link its machines with software that monitors the equipment to generate maintenance schedules and look for faults. Manish Chawla, general manager for global industrial products at the IBM computer and data company, told the FT event:  “A lot of companies are sitting on a goldmine [of data].”

Networks and collaboration are crucial to using data more effectively, says Manish Chawla of IBM (left). Photo: FT 

The second of the Cs – collaboration –can help companies to use and share data more effectively. Kone, the Finland-based maker of escalators and lifts, is one of several companies with which IBM has formed a partnership.

Whenever a person steps on or off an escalator, an item of data is generated. If this is collected, the software reveals useful information about travel patterns, perhaps inside a railway station.

If this information is linked to sensors recording associated “people movements” (for instance about people going in and out of doors) then a fuller picture of life within the building structure can be obtained. That helps the operator of the building to manage key aspects such as energy provision and security. Schneider – the French equipment manufacturer which also has a large business offering energy management services – is another partner in the IBM/Kone relationship.

Information is all around us – many manufacturers need to learn to use it better

IBM, in its work on the internet of things, can point to its collaboration with several other firms. Examples are the Swedish capital goods company Sandvik, where the partnership is geared to creating maintenance schedules for mining machines, and Cemex, the Mexico based building materials producer. Here the data harvesting gives Cemex insights into how customers use hardware such as cement mixers, feeding information back that is useful in developing both new machines and materials.

But collaboration goes beyond simply using data more effectively.

Malte Lohan, director-general of Orgalime, a Brussels-based trade body representing Europe’s engineering industry, told the conference: “Invariably you find that innovation can be maximised through partnerships [between companies].”

Sharing ideas and insights leads to better products and solutions, says Malte Lohan of Orgalime. Photo: FT 

Steve Fisher, chief executive of Novelis, the US-based aluminium producer owned by the Indian industrial group Hindalco, elaborated on how this can work. He discussed some of the many partnerships his company has with businesses around the world – including many car makers that use aluminium to supplement the steel that most cars are predominantly made from.

A specific example is the link between Novelis and London Electric Vehicle Company, a UK-based company owned by Geely, a Chinese carmaker. LEVC is manufacturing a new generation of electric car in a £325m factory in Coventry, UK.  Some of the first models of these cars are seeing service in Britain as the latest iteration of the famous London “black cab” taxi.

Through the link with LEVC, Fisher said Novelis is learning about how the aluminium structure for the new London taxis can be bonded to the plastics-based composite panels from which – in a relatively novel departure for the automotive industry -a large part of the vehicles’ bodies are made. “We are getting some unique insights,”  Fisher said.

The final C – the capabilities of employees – stands out as another key theme.

The skills of people working in manufacturing are central to the sector’s progress  

Without the correct skills people working in manufacturing – and the firms that employ them – will be unable to capitalise on the opportunities that new technologies have to offer. Making manufacturing as a career more attractive to young people -seen by many as more receptive to taking in new ideas than older ones – is a big preoccupation for many industrial companies. This aim is behind a number of industry and technology initiatives, among them the UK’s Made Here Now project.

Fisher of Novelis gave a specific example of how his business is trying to tackle the issue. This is through a global competition, organised by the US charity FIRST and sponsored by several businesses including the aluminium producer, to encourage students to develop new generations of robots.

“By getting involved with this competition we hope to create a promising talent pool and nurture the next generation of top industry minds,” said Fisher.

While Juergen Maier, chief executive of the UK arm of Siemens, the German engineering group, recognises the importance of such projects, he says that frequently educationalists and politicians divert too many resources into efforts to tempt young people into engineering and manufacturing, and fail to do enough to educate people already working in these fields in new thinking.

Juergen Maier of Siemens makes a point at the FT conference. Photo: FT 

“Upskilling [of the existing workforce] is as big a challenge as the problems [in attracting people] at entry level,” Maier told the summit. The goal for many manufacturers must be to tackle all the three Cs simultaneously and so increase their chances of success.

By Peter Marsh

A version of this article can be seen on the website operated by Gideon Franklin, a corporate  finance advisory firm specialising in helping Japanese industrial companies to become more global. For a Japanese translation of the story see here.   

 

Eddie Davies, who has died at the age of 72, was a resolute and imaginative businessman who made his mark in three seemingly separate areas: electronics, football and cultural institutions linked to science and technology.

In electronics Davies will be remembered for his key role in building up the Isle of Man-based Strix from a fledgling business in a niche technical area into a world leader. Davies is pictured above with the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and John Incledon (centre).

In football he was instrumental in turning the illustrious Bolton Wanderers Football Club into a key force in the English Premier league, arresting several years of decline. In the arts and sciences, Davies’s support through generous gifts was immensely important to organisations such as the V&A Museum in London and Kew Gardens. He is pictured below at a Bolton match.

Strix is a British success story. It has used specialised knowhow in metals technology to become the world leader in the quirky yet important field of kettle thermostats, devices that cut off power when electric kettles boil and stop the devices becoming a safety hazard.

The company’s key invention is a modification of a technical device used in the 18^th century by British craftsmen to make clock springs, later used during World War Two to create electric thermostats to stop flying suits overheating. Thanks in large part to Davies’s acumen, these odd beginnings were fashioned into the base for a global business. Like many mid-sized engineering companies in Britain, Strix is a “hidden champion” in a product field so narrow and specialised that it’s ignored by the multinational giants.

In the 1970s kettles were predominantly employed in the English-speaking world for making tea. Today the items are just as likely to be used – in places such as China and Russia – for boiling water for soup or coffee. Every day it is estimated that 1bn people turn on kettles containing Strix’s control devices.

1bn people a day are said to use a kettle containing a Strix control.

After just over 20 years running the company, Davies sold his controlling stake in Strix in 2005, netting more than £100m. Selling out to a private equity owner was the first step to transforming Strix from what was essentially a family company to what is now a business quoted on London’s AIM stock exchange . Strix has a market capitalisation of some £300m and more than 800 employees.

The company continues to operate in much the same way as under Davies’ stewardship. It keeps its HQ, key factory for precision engineering and main R&D operations in the British Isles (on the Isle of Man). It has a determinedly global approach. Like many companies in electronics Strix  uses China for the bulk of its manufacturing. Strix’s main plant is in the southern city of Guangzhou, which opened in 1997. According to a 2018 brokers’ report: “Strix should enjoy steady top line expansion. The company demonstrates product superiority and integrity in what appears a growth market. Strix’s leading [approximately] 38 per cent global market share tends to confirm product superiority while we identify ample scope for the market to grow.”

Many of the kettle makers that Strix sells to are Chinese

Davies was generous to me as a journalist in giving insights and opinions on what was going on in both football and business. He had a courteous (often reserved)  manner though could be fiery on occasions when something annoyed him, for instance referring decisions in soccer matches that he disagreed with. Davies wasn’t given to flamboyant gestures. He did nothing to make himself appear a public figure, using words sparingly in most conversations and generally avoiding media interviews. This policy ensured for many years he barely figured in newspaper articles (apart from some pieces in the Financial Times mainly written by me).

I first met Davies in the early 2000s when after much effort I went to the Isle of Man to see him as the head of Strix. Working at the FT I’d heard about Strix. It seemed an intriguing company. But Strix was notoriously private and difficult to find out about. Luckily Davies opened doors.  On the Isle of Man trip I met some fascinating characters and learned some aspects to how the company worked.

Strix’s controls have revolutionised the kettle industry

Strix had been set up in 1982 on the Isle of Man by John Taylor, who while a skilled inventor lacked the management capabilities needed to run an expanding company. Taylor’s father, Eric, was another clever technician with a bent for innovation.  He had set up an earlier electric controls company – Otter Controls, which continues to operate from Buxton, Derbyshire – from which Strix later separated triggering a family row.  In 1984 John Taylor recruited Davies – an engineer who knew about business – as chief executive. Taylor stepped aside to become the company’s chief scientist.

Davies always said he was grateful to the education he’d had that combined – highly unusually – a lot of technical insights into both physics and accountancy. Davies said of himself: “I’m an engineer who can read balance sheet “. This combination served him well over the time when he and Taylor in tandem built up Strix’s business.

When running Strix, Davies said the model for Strix’s growth was the US’s  Intel – the world’s biggest maker of microchips. While kettles are less glamorous than semiconductors, Strix has attempted to emulate the Californian company’s approach to protecting its technical secrets and branding. “The comparison with Intel is appropriate, as many of our customers in the developing markets often put stickers on their packaging saying that there are Strix controls inside [to differentiate themselves from others using competing or counterfeit controls],” Davies told me in 2004. Strix’s gross margins at the time were 40-50 per cent, very high for an engineering business and only just below those of the US giant.  A company’s gross profit is its sales, minus costs of production, excluding overheads and research and development expenses.

Strix aims to move increasingly into coffee makers, reducing the focus on tea drinkers

Helped by Davies, I went to see the company’s small factory in Ramsey, Isle of Man, where the “blades” for Strix’s kettle thermostats are made in a secret process. I pieced together details of the high-tech bi- and tri-metallic strips contained in these blades. They are made using home-produced machines using procedures almost impossible to write into an engineering manual and tantamount to a black art. The company continues to operate in Ramsey, having resisted the temptation to switch this key element of its production to its main Guangzhou plant. It seems that Strix follows still the philosophy laid down by Davies:   “We make the blades … on the Isle of Man and then ship them to China. We would never produce them in China because the risk of competitors finding out about the technology would be too great.”

In a series of later emails Davies explained that the key to the thermostats is a sudden “snapping ” action linked to the blades’ reaction to heat. This action causes the thermostats to behave as an electric switch, so shutting off power once the kettle has boiled. According to Davies, if the muscles of a human body were to emulate the capabilities of a Strix blade, the average person would be able to lift a 100-tonne truck. This graphic description made its way into The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalisation and the End of Mass Production, a book I wrote about global industry that was published in 2012. Davies was among the guests at the Royal Academy of Engineering reception to mark the publication. He is pictured below with John Incledeon (centre), Lakshmi Mittal and Peter Marsh.

After visiting the Isle of Man, and after I’d also seen Strix’s plant in China, during a trip 2004, Davies and I struck up a good relationship. We used to meet regularly in London for lunch or dinner. While Davies favoured the Savoy Grill, I reciprocated by taking him, on FT expenses, to pleasant but less grand establishments. Davies invited my son Jonny and I to see many Arsenal v Bolton matches in the years from around 2005 when Bolton were riding high in the Premiership. At these matches, I also got to know Davies’s wife Sue – every bit as keen a Bolton fan as Davies, and in her private life a notable horse breeder.  Davies – who was born near Bolton – had taken over ownership of the club in 2003 having already been a director. During the time I was watching Bolton I grew to admire the team’s battling style and refusal to buckle. Phil Gartside was the chairman and made all the public statements about the club – something he seemed fond of doing. Sam Allardyce was the shrewd and highly successful manager who had the great ability to get the best out of the players. Davies was the behind the scenes man who provided a lot of the advice and ideas – plus a considerable sum of money – to keep the club at a high level in a tough league.

Between 2004 and 2007, when Allardyce left, Bolton finished in 8th, 6th,8th and 7th positions in the Premiership, which was very creditable for a little fancied club with relatively slim resources (although with a fantastic history). During the 13 years to 2016 when Davies owned the club, Bolton could afford, thanks to his largesse, star players including Youri Djorkaeff, Jay Jay Okocha, Nicolas Anelka (pictured below) and Fernando Hierro. Referring in a typically wry way to Bolton’s stellar league ranking, Davies once said to me, at a time when the team was doing particularly well, “We’re suffering nosebleeds up here!” Bolton’s run of success ended, however, in 2012 when the club was relegated to the second-tier Championship league.

When Davies eventually passed on the club to new owners, he wrote off personal loans of around £175m. The sales process was fraught with problems. Davies wanted to find a group of owners who would look after the club’s long-term interests. In the end he transferred the club (essentially for a negative sum) to a consortium headed by ex-player Dean Holdsworth which he thought had the right ingredients. Davies told me after completion: “What a relief. At least I can sleep nights now!”But a few months later, Bolton suffered a further blow, going down another tier to League One, though bouncing back into the Championship a year later. The Bolton Wanderers’ Supporters Trust said after his death: “Davies was BWFC through and through and he was pivotal to the success of our club in recent times.” One fan told the Bolton News: “Under Davies’s ownership we saw the best time to be a Bolton fan. May he rest in peace.” Davies is survived by Sue and a son and daughter.

The last text I got from Davies was in May 2018 after a dramatic 3-2 win over Notts Forest enabled Bolton to stave off at the last minute yet another relegation and remain in the Championship. After I’d sent a text seconds after the final whistle congratulating Bolton on this escape, Davies replied, in a terse, Davies-like way that summed up the situation perfectly: “Bloody fantastic finish.”

Davies had a bloody fantastic life for which he will be long remembered.

Peter Marsh