Diversification tactics: Naylor Industries' Bridie Warner-Adsetts and fellow shareholders
One local firm the organisation has been working with is Barnsley’s Naylor Industries. “We’ve undergone a lot of change,” says chief operating officer Bridie Warner-Adsetts, who is one of the 125-year-old, family-owned company’s three shareholders. Twenty years ago, Naylor was focused on its core business of producing clay pipe for the construction industry. But the market was changing, she says. “The business recognised that we had a declining clay market. The product had become commoditised, although to some extent that had always been the case. The construction industry was suffering from a change in its skills base, which meant clay was a more technically challenging product to install.”
The firm has since diversified into consumer gardenware, including the Yorkshire Flowerpots brand; concrete retaining blocks and lintels; and plastic piping – owner Edward Naylor having recognised the potential of this material as an alternative to clay, as the use of polymers in building materials was beginning to expand. Plastic piping for various applications is now extruded in large quantities at the Barnsley factory.
Yorkshire Flowerpots, meanwhile, was developed as a traditional English pottery line for the retail market, based on Naylor’s existing understanding of manufacturing in clay, but otherwise a departure from its traditional business. This part of the business is now worth £2.5 million. “The relationship with the customer via the retailer is different from the relationship in a trade environment,” says Naylor. “But we make a good product and have a dedicated team who understand the marketplace for it.”
From exports representing just a tiny proportion of sales in the early 1990s, Naylor now sells products in 49 countries. Turnover is set to hit £50 million this financial year, Warner-Adsetts says, but although the business has grown, staffing numbers are around the same. Lean principles have been introduced across clay, plastics and concrete production.
Naylor has been growing organically and through strategic acquisition. As PE went to press, it had acquired the exclusive European licence for a US product that helps to clean up stormwater by trapping hydrocarbons – another diversification. The aim is either to acquire businesses where Naylor understands the material processes underlying the technology – such as the injection-moulded plastic baskets used for the stormwater product – or understands the route to market, such as in construction, says Warner-Adsetts.
“What are the dangers for manufacturing businesses in sitting back?” she asks. “We can’t be said to have done that for 20 years. And change can be an infectious process, although it’s painful at the beginning.” Naylor products carry the ‘Made in Sheffield’ mark, but Warner-Adsetts says she would not rule out overseas manufacture “for the right product, for the right market”. However, the ‘Made in Sheffield’ mark is prestigious, she says. “We are well received around the world because we are a British manufacturer that manufactures in the UK. The mark is internationally recognised.”
Still going strong: Exhausts UK adopt lean principles
Brother and sister team Peter and Rachel Jarvis have also used the assistance of MAS to expand the prospects for their Sheffield engineering business Exhausts UK, which manufactures custom exhausts. The firm makes performance exhausts for sports cars and employs 20 people, including several designers, engineers and welding specialists. The pair’s father ran an exhaust maintenance business in the city that began making small numbers of custom designs.
Nowadays, the stainless steel Exhausts UK machines tend to come from mills in Poland and Germany rather than from Sheffield. Most designs are now reproduced in larger volumes for OEMs and other customers, and fitted via tuning shops and garages. In a good week, Exhausts UK might make 100 products. Peter Jarvis says working with MAS allowed the company to introduce lean principles, such as the introduction of cleaning stations, which speeded up production. “MAS has really helped prepare us to grow,” he says.
Exhausts UK is now preparing to access the mainland European market, where regulations on fitting exhaust systems are tighter than in Britain. Accessing this market includes attaining ISO 9001, which Peter also believes “will be coming to the UK in the next 10 years, so we’ll be prepared”.
As with seemingly everywhere in manufacturing, skills remain a challenge for the firm. Managing director Rachel Jarvis says she welcomes the introduction of a university technical college to Sheffield. “We’re recruiting for a CNC operator, and you can’t find people who have experience. You have to train them. We operate tube-bending machines, and at one time you would have found people in Sheffield with that experience. When we look for welders and fabricators, everybody’s got to be trained.”
Peter Jarvis says that the city is “still living with the legacy of the 1980s – and there has been too much pushing of soft options as career choices”. He adds that government “has recognised that manufacturing is coming back to the UK”. Would it be easy for a firm in China to replicate what you’re doing here? I ask. He smiles. “If they put 10 years’ work in.”
The legacy of the 1980s is something that Carr from Mechan is aware of, as he has been a Sheffield manufacturing industry insider since that decade. He was on a Youth Training Scheme in 1984 that saw him work for, and subsequently get laid off by, heavy engineering firm Davy Markham, he says. Mechan is now based on the same site as that company; in a sense, he has come full circle.
Carr was approached to run the business with a view to owning it and, before agreeing, thought carefully about what would make it succeed. “Most of the processes, apart from machining, were done in-house. Those things we weren’t as good as others at, or could be done more cheaply, I outsourced. The business was probably guilty of doing too much metal-bashing for the sake of it,” he says.
But Mechan still uses plenty of local suppliers. It was one of the founders of the ‘Made in Sheffield’ brand, and the intention was to use as many local firms as possible. “Sheffield is still very much an engineering-led city, and we have a great supply chain,” he says. Now, 80% of the company’s suppliers are within 20 miles of its site.
There are plenty of reasons to celebrate Yorkshire’s manufacturing prowess, says Carr, including Sheffield Forgemasters, Davy Markham and the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre – whose work with Boeing attracts engineers to the region – and the Nuclear AMRC, both in Rotherham, along with many smaller engineering suppliers. There is also Finnish giant Outokumpu in Sheffield, whose integrated stainless steel site includes a melt shop and continuous casting operations, bar finishing facility and a rod mill – part of the company’s long products business line. The site also includes stocking, processing and distribution centres.
Along with Exhausts UK, Carr is pleased that Sheffield now has a university technical college – with another due to open next year. “I’ve never had to go outside Sheffield for any of our support services,” he adds.
The government has had a “rude awakening about the importance of manufacturing”, he says. “In 20-odd years, it has done anything but support it. I think the perception of engineering is now changing.”
Schematics firm selects Rotherham for UK base
From an industrial estate in Rotherham, German giant Friedhelm Loh Group has established a bridgehead into the British manufacturing IT market for its Eplan suite of electrical design and schematics software.
UK clients include food and beverage companies and automotive OEMs. Eplan produces electrical schematics and pneumatic and hydraulic fluid diagrams, and process and control schematics for piping for oil and gas and chemical plants. There are tools for communicating with enterprise resource planning and material requirements planning systems, and to integrate with purchasing systems and data management tools. Components such as motors can be characterised by their power output or identified by part numbers, generating a bill of materials for a design further down the line. Design components can then be ordered automatically.
The Eplan system employs macros or libraries to store common layouts for control equipment, which speeds up the design process. “If you did this in a general 2D system that is just a drawing package, then you would have to add the numbers manually,” says Ken Christie, Eplan UK director. “All the information would be labelled by hand, and there is no way of telling if I have numbered two separate motors the same.” Some 2D packages are adopted for electrical design, but all devices need to be numbered. The bill of materials would need to be compiled by counting up devices, terminal wires and labels, which Eplan does automatically. Used with software that measures heat accumulation, from sister company Rittal, the system can tell an electrical designer how thermally efficient a design is likely to be. The package works out temperature rise, which can entail introducing more cooling.
Eplan was originally designed, 30 years ago, specifically for electrical engineers. “The product has been developed over that time to address issues raised by electrical engineers using 2D products,” says Christie. “It’s all about things that electrical engineers find tedious.”
Friedhelm Loh is marketing Eplan in 50 countries, including Australia, South Africa and Turkey. There are around 40,000 customers for the software globally, running 100,000 separate licences.