Tom Shelley asks successful Queen's Award
winning exporters what they believed were the foundations of
their success
"A lot of passion" was what Martin
Fitch-Roy, managing director of Dando Drilling believed to be the
foundation of his 15-strong firm's success, leading to a 237%
overseas sales growth over the three years to June 2002.
The company designs, manufactures and sells drilling rigs, mainly
to provide clean water in Third World countries. "We have
been very busy in Northern Iraq. We are a very old traditional
company founded in 1867, but have tried to modernise. Although we
are an engineering company, we consider ourselves to now be
market-driven rather than engineering-driven. We recognise the
need to have a knowledge of different cultures where we sell, and
are very careful about how we choose our sales staff. One of our
salesmen speaks Farsi, Hindi and Arabic."
On management organisation, he explained, "We avoid
duplication of effort. We are very specific about areas of
responsibility. Marketing markets and salesmen sell. Engineering
is still very important. Designs have to be developed more
quickly now. We use AutoCAD because it makes it easier to
exchange data between our three sites in Littlehampton. We also
exchange data with suppliers. We buy a lot of capital equipment
and require truck drawings to be e-mailed to us."
He summarised the firm's engineering philosophy as,
"Appropriate technology. We don't use electronically
controlled hydraulics in machines that will be used in
Sub-Saharan Africa. We do D more than R. Customers constantly
want more powerful and faster machines. It is very important to
have new products to offer but it is difficult to take time out
come up with something revolutionary. Over a billion people in
the world do not have clean water to drink and we see it as our
mission to help them obtain it."
R&D essential
Dr Barlow, technology manager of PerkinElmer Optoelectronics
attributed much of his company's success to R&D. And managing
director Dr Ian Mackenzie agreed: "We simply couldn't
survive without R&D."
Part of the much larger US-based PerkinElmer group, the
Optoelectronics division in Wokingham makes fibre optic test
equipment and increased overseas earnings by 256% over three
years, more than doubling its workforce to 65 at the same time.
Dr Barlow praised the, "hard work of colleagues and
employees, their ability to innovate and their flexibility."
He described the firm as a, "completely integrated business
including R&D, system assembly/test and world-wide sales
groups." The company makes extensive use of enterprise
resource planning (ERP) software and CAD but does not use CAM.
Instead, final assembly is, "mostly by skilled assembly
staff." Metal parts and circuit boards are made by
subcontract manufacturers, mostly local, but all files and
drawings are still exchanged by e-mail. Barlow described
"strategic and personal relationships with suppliers and
customers" as particularly crucial.
A power for winning
Charles Soothill, vice president of Alstom's Power Technology
Centre, also saw R&D as crucial to the success of its
business, along with forming long-term, close relationships with
clients and OEMs and maintaining a high profile in the
marketplace.
He described the business as, "developing
gas turbine technology," and the supply of crucial rotating
parts such as turbine discs. "R&D is necessary to
differentiate our products. We need to be able to offer improved
environmental performance and to anticipate future regulatory and
customer needs." The firm supports, "academic research
in various leading universities," and employs "six
times more engineers than craftsmen."
He did comment that, "It is one thing to develop a
technology, but it is at least as difficult to put it into
production." The company has its own "Private IT
networks" and uses video conferencing but does not use a
single proprietary software to integrate its business processes.
"Things change so fast that if we had a rigid system, it
would soon not be suitable," Soothill explained.
Pneumatics force path to success
Several of the winners had built a successful business on an
innovative idea.
One such company was Ultra Electronics Precision Air Systems,
part of the Ultra Electronics buyout of the former Dowty
Electronics Systems Division.
The fundamental breakthrough is the development of 350bar air
compressors, capable of replacing gas bottles and pyrotechnics in
primarily military systems. The firm has 74 employees and has
seen exports grow by 183% over three years, mostly to the US.
MD Paul Benson described the compressors as being
electric motor-driven swashplate pumps, "about the size of a
softball" (300mm across). Coming from miniature compressors
for thermal imaging systems as a replacement for gas bottles,
they have more recently found their way into aircraft wings to
launch missiles and other stores. They have to occupy the same
space and weigh no more than bottles of compressed nitrogen.
"R&D is very crucial," Benson
explained. "We put a lot of effort into it and it represents
a high percentage of our profits. In aerospace projects, you
always have to look at the long picture and think about what you
may be selling in ten years' time. Many technical problems had to
be overcome in order to develop the compressors, such as finding
sliding seals able to survive the high air pressures and
temperatures from -50 {{deg}} C to 90 {{deg}}C."
Asked whether the compressors had any civilian use, Benson
replied that thermal imaging is extensively used for civilian
purposes, but that at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds each,
the devices were too expensive for industrial applications. But,
a lot of the cost stems from, "meeting the needs of the
aerospace environment," and we gathered it might well be
possible to make them a lot cheaper if other markets should open
up.
On the management front, the company is working with the West of
England Aerospace Forum and the Society of British Aerospace
Constructors on lean aerospace initiatives. Benson added:
"The idea is to take the best automotive principles and
apply them to aerospace production. We are applying 'Value Stream
Mapping' - looking at the way we get equipment from suppliers,
and perform inspections and kitting. We are looking at every
piece of paper in our process, and deciding which are necessary
evils and which are waste." One of the goals is to produce a
'Future State Map' to improve the business process.
At this point, Eureka asked if the firm was paperless. Benson
smiled at the suggestion and added that, "there is no point
in automating wasteful processes using IT." The company does
make use of IT in that it 3D models its designs using
Pro/Engineer, electronically exchanges designs and uses web
invoicing with its US clients. But it does not take part in any
electronic bidding process.
A light to the future
Somewhat smaller, with only 13 staff in the UK (plus six in the
US), STG Aerospace in Norfolk has also taken a single initial
idea and turned it into a commercial success.
CEO Peter Stokes explained, "We design
photoluminescent way guidance systems, which we also
invented." Energised by light and requiring no electricity,
they are 100% reliable and came out of thoughts inspired by the
Manchester Air Disaster in 1985. Although the company started in
1986, it only started to develop and market its innovations
professionally after 1998. "It was originally a cottage
industry, which we had to turn into a commercial business. We
will spend 20% of our turnover this year on R&D in order to
produce products that will be even safer and save money. CAA and
FAA approvals are crucial so we have to be completely on the
ball. We have a number of partnerships tied by legal agreement to
help develop future products. These include partnerships with
industrial designers, an electronics think tank and a plastics
technologist."
STG makes its own photoluminescent coatings but buys-in
mouldings. It assembles and tests new products in-house,
"because we have to. We don't want to employ a big labour
force. We don't have enough production volume to keep an
extrusion machine or a PCB machine fully occupied.
"Marketing and outsourcing are crucial. We link to customers
such as Boeing and Embraer electronically and they have access to
some of our database through linked MRP to deal with lead times,
stock levels and order requirements. We are tremendous users of
the Internet. We use e-marketing, and have a web site. We find
that for a small company selling to the world, e-mail shots are a
very good way of getting messages to the right people."
Exports grew by nearly 800% over the last four years. Some 50% of
exports are to the US and 30% to Europe. STG has a 60% share of
the market.
Dando Drilling International
PerkinElmer
Alstom Power
Technology Centre
Ultra Electronics Precision Air
Systems
STG Aerospace.com
For more technical
developments see www.eurekamagazine.co.uk