16th October 2020
PP Control & Automation built on its success at the Made in the Midlands Awards by securing another prestigious business title last night.
We were named as the ‘Medium Company of the Year’ at the Business Desk Masters 20 virtual ceremony, impressing judges with our commitment to developing contract manufacturing and controls and automation capabilities for 25 of the world’s biggest machine builders.
They also praised our involvement in the VentilatorChallengeUK consortium, where we pivoted our manufacturing operations to supply critical electrical harnesses for use in the build – all completed within a 12-week window.
“It has been an excellent two weeks for the business, with the Masters’ triumph coming just a week after the Insider Made in the Midlands Award,” explained Tony Hague, CEO of PP Control & Automation.
“With all of the challenges of Covid-19, it is great for our 230-strong workforce to be recognised for their commitment, hard work, innovation and desire to be the best in our field. We have a fantastic team and one we are very proud of.”
Ian Knight, Chief Information Officer at PP Control & Automation (PP C&A) challenges the prevailing, often vague narrative around AI adoption and reframes the conversation around a more practical starting point: operational constraints.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept for manufacturers. It is already being explored across quotation, production planning, engineering, quality, supply chain and customer service functions. Yet, for many organisations, the gap between experimentation and meaningful operational impact remains difficult to close.
A leading aquaculture specialist – that is changing the way fish are vaccinated safely – has signed a major manufacturing deal.
On paper, defined discipline-specific suppliers can look organised. However, every additional supplier introduces another handoff, and every handoff creates another point where time, quality, communication and accountability can be lost.
Very rarely does growth not surface because an OEM lacks ambition. Shortcomings arise because operating models built to support such ambition don’t evolve quickly enough.
Recent weeks have brought two important industry moments into sharp focus, concluding that demand for AI and automation is rising, but investment, skills, and long-term thinking must follow.
For decades, one question has sat at the heart of operational strategy for machine builders and OEMs: make or buy? It’s a familiar debate and it isn’t the wrong question by any means, but perhaps it is an incomplete one.
In most machine building businesses, change is still treated as an exception. A late-stage drawing revision, component substitution, or wiring tweak discovered during build. Each one is handled, resolved, and signed off. And then everyone moves on. But what if that’s the wrong way to think about it? What if change isn’t the disruption to the system but the system itself?
