Industry Forum

SMMT Industry Forum was delighted to attend the 106th SMMT Annual Dinner this week as one of the most prestigious events in the automotive calendar.

Addressing industry leaders and politicians Alison Jones, SMMT President and Senior Vice President Global Circular Economy, Stellantis, praised the industry’s resilience and commitment to green growth, saying,

As an industry, we have moved forward despite the instability, despite legislative uncertainty, inflation and geopolitical risk. The industry has backed itself with big decisions on big investments to guarantee jobs and our future. We have seen major commitments in battery production, lithium mining, vehicle manufacturing, R&D and the aftermarket. Such investment – and our ability to remain competitive – is key to the continuation of a strong UK manufacturing base and a sector that sustains nearly a million livelihoods.

Nusrat Ghani MP, Minister of State for Industry and Economic Security spoke to welcome the recent investments in UK Automotive in 2023

We started this year with quite a few challenges and obstacles ahead of us. But with a joint effort we are finishing on a high point as one of the most successful years in our recent history

The special guest speaker was The Rt Hon Rory Stewart OBE talking about his time in government and the outlook for the political landscape in 2024 and beyond.

Some of Britain’s biggest automotive companies pledged that women will represent 30% of their workforce within the next six years, in a bid to drive gender diversity across all roles and levels. The commitment by the Automotive Council, whose members represent 99% of British vehicle manufacturing and half of the UK’s automotive workforce, is a significant short-term challenge given that just under 20% of the sector’s workforce is today female. The Council also launched a new best practice guide, Shifting Gears: How to better recruit and retain women in the UK automotive sector, to provide forward-thinking businesses across the industry – from car and commercial vehicle manufacturing to supply chain and the aftermarket – with the tools needed to improve gender diversity across all levels.

It was a fantastic event providing much-needed industry insights and an opportunity to meet representatives across the automotive industry.

The automotive industry is contributing significantly to employment and export revenues in the UK economy. Global competition and technology advancements are a threat to the UK automotive market, and have evolved exponentially, especially after Covid and Brexit.

It’s imperative then, that automotive manufacturers seek innovative strategies to improve productivity, efficiency, and overall performance. One such approach gaining momentum is the adoption of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). In this blog post, we will delve into the importance of TPM in the UK automotive sector and explore its benefits.

Empowering the Workforce:

TPM is not just about equipment maintenance, it also focuses on developing people and appreciating their value. It is the workforce that maintain and improve the machines, equipment, and systems, and especially with Industry 4.0, without the workforce having the right skills to analyse, troubleshoot and intervene at the right time, the situation could be catastrophic.

TPM emphasises developing a culture of continuous improvement involving the entire workforce through engaging employees at all levels to foster a sense of ownership, responsibility, and empowerment.

Enhancing Equipment Reliability:

The UK automotive sector relies heavily on sophisticated machinery and equipment to meet the production demands of an increasingly competitive market. TPM not only focuses on equipment reliability through proactive maintenance practices, but also looks into ease of maintenance, ideally maintenance free. This leads to enhanced manufacturing processes, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

Enforcing in Quality and Safety

In the automotive sector, maintaining high standards of quality and safety is paramount. Striving for zero-defects and zero accidents are the way forward. People and Equipment are the biggest asset within the business to enforce the dynamic of quality and safety. TPM worked with the asset within the business to aim for zero losses as a result.

Hence, TPM can revolutionise the way automotive organisations operate. Embracing TPM principles will not only drive efficiency, productivity, and profitability but also pave the way for sustainable growth and success in the dynamic automotive industry.

TPM Origins

TPM was developed by the Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance in 1971 and has been continually refined since.

Our partnership with JIPM

TPM originated from the Japanese Institute of Plant Maintenance (JIPM). SMMT Industry Forum is 1 of 4 certified TPM consultancies globally, and the only one in the UK awarded by JIPM to provide TPM related training and consultancy.

We pride ourselves on our ‘Learn by Doing’ approach, which enables your organisation to benefit from the implementation as well as develop people through ongoing coaching and consultancy.

For more information on how we can help you and your organisation, contact us on 0121 717 6600 or email enquiries@if.wearecoal.work.

Freight and logistics companies know that their industry is undergoing rapid change. Digitalisation and automation are no longer optional extras to improve performance and business transformations essential for survival.

The logistics sector has been traveling along this road for a while, with some activities such as sortation of packages, for example, already largely automated. However, a number of threats and opportunities are currently converging to increase the speed of travel across the industry.

The drive to automate

Historically reliant on the availability of low-cost, often imported labour for picking operations, logistics firms have seen wages rise and labour-pools shrink over the past two decades. Now Brexit threatens to stem European workforce streams even more, further increasing the drive to automate.

The ending of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020 may also sound the death knell for the humble wooden pallet, which will no longer be able to move from the UK to or through the EU unless it has been heat-treated, thanks to ISPM 15 requirements for non-EU goods. That additional cost layer reduces the price gap between wood pallets and their plastic counterparts, which also interface far more successfully with automated equipment, as well as being recyclable and repairable. In this way, another barrier to automation is falling away and its momentum increasing.

At the same time, COVID-19 has caused businesses everywhere to re-examine their staffing strategies, reducing face-to-face human interactions as far as possible. The more automated an operation, the less it will be affected by lockdowns on the one hand, and the better able to cope with big peaks and troughs in demand on the other, without having to deal with staff shortages or furloughing of employees. In other words, automation can mitigate a lot of the new ‘people’ risks logisticians now have to deal with. Added to which, environmental concerns are pushing companies to look at their carbon footprint and endeavour to make energy savings through, among other things, lights-out warehouses and distribution centres.

Meanwhile, requirements of retailers and other customers are becoming increasingly stringent, with delivery on time and in full demanded as the norm, even as they turn up the pressure to reduce unit costs. That level of certainty at a viable price necessitates automated processes.

All of this means the writing is on the wall for manual systems.

The logistics sector is likely to become increasingly polarised over the next five years, with a growing gap between those focussing on applying appropriate technologies and management methodologies and those left behind. When the automation dust has settled, we may see a group of large, high-tech, global players developing lasting relationships with big brands on the one hand, and a reduced number of smaller, old-school companies competing for short-to-medium-term contracts on the other, while their margins are increasingly squeezed.

Following the auto route

Time is short, but automation is a large, strategic investment and it needs to be done right. That means stepping back from day-to-day operations to look objectively at the big picture. That way, you can ask the right questions to really understand the current and future requirements of your business and that of your customers. That’s the first step in identifying the approaches you might need to take to make the necessary big changes happen in order to remain competitive for the long term. It’s worth investing in the support of an experienced partner who can guide this process and provide a valuable external perspective.

Freight and logistics companies can learn a lot from the automotive sector which has long been applying improvement tools and techniques such as lean management across the supply chain to solve problems, assure quality, automate and optimise operations. Indeed, lean methodologies originated in 20th century motor vehicle manufacturing in the form of the Toyota Production System. But they are just as relevant today, and just as effective for service industries as for manufacturing.

While some larger logistics companies are already applying these approaches with some success, the sector as a whole has yet to fully embrace them. However, the inevitable arrival of automation may yet drive their take-up as they have the potential to greatly facilitate that transformation.

Maximising value through lean

Lean management, or simply ‘lean’, denotes a set of principles designed to eliminate all kinds of waste from business processes, while staying focused on delivering exactly what customers want, on time and in full. Lean is all about continuous improvement enabling companies to be sufficiently agile to remain competitive, survive and thrive. It helps improve productivity and profitability by eliminating everything that does not add value to customers.

Lean’s five core principles are:

  • precisely specifying the value of each product or service
  • identifying its value stream
  • making value flow without interruptions
  • allowing customers to pull value from your business
  • pursuing perfection

By looking at your services from a pull rather than push perspective and continuously striving to achieve an uninterrupted flow of the right process at the right place and time, you can make significant improvements to your bottom line and your offering to customers. As well as this, lean’s determined focus on innovation, efficiency and delivering what customers want can help streamline and shorten long tendering processes and increase contract-win rates.

Similar to lean is total productive maintenance (TPM). Widely used in the food and chemical industries, TPM uses eight ‘pillars’ of activity to provide a structured approach to eliminating all kinds of losses across a whole organisation and throughout its value stream. Because it aims to optimise equipment and processes to deliver zero breakdowns, zero failures and zero accidents by eliminating poor maintenance or operations practices, TPM is ideally suited as a methodology to implement and maintain automated operations. It can help you ensure the service reliability you need to differentiate your business in a crowded market.

How can smaller companies compete?

Transforming operations through automation may seem out of the reach of SMEs which lack big engineering departments. How, then, can they remain competitive if they can’t keep up with the larger players?

There’s a lot they can do to optimise the efficiency and value of their existing systems using lean techniques – and the need to do so is likely to become ever more pressing. By forensically reviewing and improving your current systems, layout and process flows, end-to-end, you can greatly boost your competitiveness

Our benchmarking research shows that the greatest challenge for small and medium sized companies is the ability to develop and implement an effective vision and strategy that drives results. Applied systematically, lean can really help to crack that conundrum.

Getting started

The prospect of bringing about transformative change across an organisation is daunting. Start with a pilot project – a service or process that is large enough to give some measurable impact and engage enough people, but small enough to be achievable. It has to be something that is significant to your business and within your gift to change within a timeframe of around six months. Learn from the experience, gather feedback and then feed that into a cycle of continuous improvement.

Industry Forum can guide you through the steps to help you understand your requirements in detail and design a decision-making process that will enable you to move forward in the right direction,

Look out for our future articles on transitioning to logistics automation, the distribution centre as a lean factory and sustainability and the green supply chain.

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Article written by: Simon Carr, General Manager SMMT Industry Form

Simon has 24 years engineering and operations experience gained within aerospace, industrial processing, automotive, food and drink, defence, electronics, fabrication, petrochemical, offshore systems, pharmaceutical, healthcare and banking. Simon was one of the original Industry Forum recruits and was trained by the Japanese Master Engineers.  Recent assignments include significant capital projects for the Ministry of Defence and in the Oil & Gas sector.

Industry Forum is a proud sponsor of the Northern Automotive Alliance Business Awards & Networking Dinner – People & Skills award 

Category: NAA People & Skills Award
Sponsor: SMMT Industry Forum 

Open to: All SMEs 

Established in 1996 by British government, the SMMT and vehicle manufactures, Industry Forum exists to improve both performance and competitiveness in UK supply chain. Central to our ethos is a ingrained dedication to developing people and skills in the Automotive sector. 

As part of our commitment to continued development of skills and people, we sponsor the NAA people and skills award which serves to acknowledge and celebrate investment in skills by a small to medium sized enterprise employing less than 250 people in the engineering and advanced manufacturing sector.  This award is designed to recognise an exemplary business that invests in both the training and development of its workforce. We will be looking for applicants who can demonstrate that they are a leading light in this area by showing clear evidence of how investment in skills can bring benefits to people and businesses alike. 

We ask that applicants answer the questions as fully as possible, keeping to the word count.  We also welcome the inclusion of photographs or diagrams that help support your application.

This award may consist of a 2-stage process.  The first stage is the People & Skills Award form from which 3 companies will be short-listed.  Dependent upon the applications there may be a second stage will take the form of on-site visit to further investigate each application and its background.  Feedback will be provided to each company that receives an on-site visit.  The on-site visits will be undertaken during October 2018.

Forms can be downloaded here and closing date is midnight, 31st August.

PLEASE NOTE: The NAA awards are open to all companies, you do not need to be an NAA member to enter the awards. 

About the awards: 

Northern Automotive Alliance Business Awards & Networking Dinner

Thursday 8th November 2018 7pm – 12pm at The Mere Golf Resort & Spa, Knutsford, Cheshire.

The event is is an opportunity to network with NAA members over dinner and drinks. The attendee numbers have grown year on year and this year is expected to be better than ever. It’s recently been announced that Master of Ceremonies and guest speaker for the 2018 NAA Awards will be Robert Llewellyn, actor (Kryten in Red Dwarf), comedian, writer, TV presenter (Scrapheap Challenge), presenter of the highly successful Fully Charged series on YouTube about electric vehicles, and most recently, the man behind the inaugural Fully Charged Live Event.  

Entry for award applications is now open. Becoming a shortlisted applicant at the NAA Business Awards will provide your organisation with the opportunity to be recognised as a leading player in the automotive industry.

Award Categories:

  • Trade
  • Innovation
  • Logistics Excellence
  • Marketing Excellence
  • Manufacturing Excellence
  • People & Skills (for SMEs)
  • Industry 4.0

Dinner Booking:

Table of 10 : £800* 

Individual Tickets : £85*

All the above include a three course meal with coffee and drinks.

Dress Code : Gents – Lounge Suit; Ladies – Long or Cocktail Dress

If you would like to book a place or receive more information on event sponsorship, please e-mail zoe@northernautoalliance.com

*Above prices are subject to vat.

A number of rooms have been reserved at a preferential rate from £125 on a B&B basis – if you would like to reserve a room, please contact the hotel and quote our event and date.

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