A Manchester-headquartered manufacturing firm has saved jobs, reduced its impact on the environment and improved its financial position by working with GC Business Growth Hub.
Bridgewater Laminates is a joinery manufacturing business, providing washroom systems, clinical and bespoke furniture for settings such as healthcare, education and office environments.
Since working with the Hub, Bridgewater Laminates has protected 15 roles within the business, improved sales by £130,000 and saved more than 6 tonnes of CO2e.
The firm has also seen a 44 per cent increase in performance per employee.
The Growth Hub was initially asked to help with minimising wastage in the business and reducing the net spend on skips and waste removal but saw several opportunities where its intervention could spur on further growth.
Andrea Hill, account manager, says: “The Hub helped to sort out the waste and use of skips but also encouraged Aiden to let our manufacturing team take a look around. When we looked more closely at their manufacturing process, we could see how we could introduce efficiencies and make soft changes that would make significant improvements.”
The company had been through an acquisition in 2018, transitioning from being a family firm to one run by a team that had seen potential in the business. Newly installed managing director, Aiden Berry, had changed his career from finance to manufacturing and was confident in his people management skills, but less so on the specifics of running a manufacturing operation.
He says: “It wasn’t just a new business, it was a completely new sector for me because I was going from finance into manufacturing. I was confident in the people management side of things, but as a sector it was a new world. My partners did help me with that, but the folks at Growth Hub were great to bounce ideas off and show me what to look out for.”
Through the Hub’s Mentoring Service, Aiden was connected to mentor Paul Norris, who had run several types of business, including some in similar markets to Bridgewater Laminates. Paul worked with Aiden to improve his understanding of time management, delegation and forecasting as well as building his confidence as a new business owner.
Berry says: “On a personal level, I gained so much confidence. Moving from management to a directorship meant that I was experiencing a lot of things for the first time and feeling a bit of imposter syndrome. When you move from being a small cog in a big engine, to being a major component you can put a bit more pressure on yourself that might be a bit undue.”
The Growth Hub helped to introduce a raft of different measures to help improve efficiencies and opened up opportunities for grant funding.
As part of these, the company was given access to a Covid Small Business Recovery Grant allowing the firm to invest in panel lifting machinery, which minimised inefficiencies and reduced health and safety risks.
Rachel Baldry, manufacturing advisor at the Growth Hub, worked alongside Berry and says: “We helped to secure funding for a panel lifter, a key piece of equipment for the modern manufacturer. Team members were working together to lift huge panels of material onto a saw ready for cutting, which was inefficient and not ideal from a health and safety point of view.
“Helping Bridgewater to secure a small business grant to go towards a panel lifter meant that the lifter and the saw can be operated by one person alone. We have helped to free up people’s time to work independently and efficiently.”
The introduction of the panel lifter also enabled the business to release an employee and make a resource available to upskill as a CNC apprentice utilising advice and support available from the Skills for Growth Programme (SfG).
The Made Smarter team ran a Digital Transformation Workshop with Aiden and his team to identify the need to improve connectivity from their design software to their machinery on the shop floor.
The solution came in the shape of a bespoke piece of software which allows design software and software used by the CNC machine to communicate without manipulating anything.
The Hub has partially funded the software package itself via the Greater Manchester Manufacturing Growth Fund delivered by the Manufacturing team while Made Smarter’s digital technology internship programme has also provided a fully-funded intern to carry out the work. The programme has started and the software is well into development with test pieces that are due to go live in the near future.
Berry adds: “We’ve really been helped in terms of our software development, and the Made Smarter team was so important in showing us what was available in the market to help that process. They did a lot of research on our behalf, which was really amazing.
“Even something as simple as being introduced to software like Pipedrive and Trello has been really revolutionary for us. We’re now in the process of linking all of our different systems to create a seamless route to manufacturing for a product and the work the Made Smarter did with us was crucial to that. We’re 70 per cent of the way there now.”
Through its work with several aspects of the Growth Hub, Bridgewater Laminates has become a modern manufacturing facility in a great position to expand and grow.
Berry says: “We’re in a stronger position now than we were in 2019, we don’t want to grow unsustainably and what we’ve done is bolster our position and solidify the bottom line. We’re more efficient and the customer experience is better. Making sure to improve the bottom line has primed us for future growth.”
