The Sharing in Growth (SiG) Ikigai trophy was handed over on 10 January in front of Produmax’s 70-strong workforce as well as guests from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Safran Nacelles, BAE Systems and Senior Aerospace, the EEF, Bradford City Council, and Keighley College.
The Ikigai trophy was presented to Produmax managing director Jeremy Ridyard by Dr Bryan Jackson, chairman of SiG.
Produmax, which specialises in the manufacture of flight control components, was selected for the SiG transformation programme in 2014. Since then it has created a vision to be engineering superheroes and developed its business significantly.
Its total business transformation included opening new headquarters, changing its culture, creating a farsighted strategy and delivering operational performance in line with world-class practices. As a result, the family-run firm has secured almost £20 million in contracts, won three new customers and grown its workforce by 40%.
Produmax managing director Jeremy Ridyard said: “With SiG’s support, we developed a new strategy that required an efficiency model to support our component and assemblies business and a service model to deliver spares and new product introduction.
“As part of our business transformation, SiG helped us change our culture, shopfloor layout, and processes to support continuous improvement. As a result our operational KPIs have improved to world-class levels. For example, we reduced lead-time from 32 days to 23 hours and machine set up time has been reduced by 75%.
“We are investing in people and technology. We are looking at hard meal cutting, complex assembly and additive layer manufacture and, through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Leeds University, we are solving technological challenges, like tool life management and operating temperatures so that we can increase capacity through automation, taking advantage of lights out weekend running.”
Companies interested in joining the SiG programme can complete an expression of interest form which is available at www.sig-uk.org/apply.
