Together, we deliver breakthrough and accelerated business performance by using design and innovation methods
Stand & Deliver
We often see mature businesses, with solid reputations, finding it harder to grow than it should be when demand is there. Good internal capability is often diluted by vague or ambiguous strategy, an opportunist sales culture delivering perpetually bespoke products, most of which don’t make any money, and R&D’s too busy ‘chasing their tails’ doing specials to get on with predicting the future. Does this sound familiar?
We’re working with a long-standing, family-owned and controlled manufacturer of pressure vessels whose founding forefathers were vigorous innovators, patenting mechanisms, processes and registering trademarks frequently – a hallmark of many British manufacturing companies of the period. Their machines deliver productivity and consistent quality for, amongst others, manufacturers of precision components in the aerospace and automotive sectors.
In the early 2000s, the Board was advised to split the business between the heavy-engineering type manufacture of the pressure vessels and the technology that controls their performance but doing so brought another set of issues altogether. After several internally-led attempts to put NPD at the heart of the business, our assignment is to harness and shape NPD to drive growth which involves focusing on the following ;
- Defining an NPD strategy which, in service of the commercial strategy, will deliver the growth the directors are looking for.
- Making the transition from a jobbing-shop to a batch-production manufacturing model and achieve greater and more predictable profitability through standardisation / repeatability.
- Moving away from an opportunistic, ‘anything’s possible’ sales culture to a more disciplined ‘sell what we make’ approach by having the confidence that their products ‘hit the spot’ in their defined markets.
- Changing a mindset that defines NPD solely as developing products to one that thinks of it as the introduction and exploitation of products, services and technologies.
- Innovating in the use of external resources to augment current capacity and capability and reduce time-to-market.
- Building the NPD team’s confidence and credibility to ensure buy-in from colleagues across the business.
