2nd June 2025
One of the UK’s leading strategic manufacturing outsourcing specialists has thrown its support behind a Shropshire school vying for national honours.
PP Control & Automation (PP C&A), which employs 230 people at its facility in Cheslyn Hay, has been mentoring three teams at Newport Girls’ High School (NGHS) in the Young Enterprise Awards programme.
CEO Tony Hague has been involved from the start of the competition, providing advice and commercial guidance to the budding business leaders on how to develop and bring to market a new product.
It has been a successful partnership with NGHS winning seven out of ten categories at the Shropshire awards and Tag-Along being chosen to represent the county at the West Midlands final, where it again came out on top.
The Tag-Along product comes in several colours and the option to personalise.
The product is designed to attach your belongings to either yourself or items such as bags, suitcases and pushchairs.
Nearly £2500 of profit has already been generated through trade fairs and online sales, with the team now setting its sights on taking the national ‘YE’ title in Manchester on June 4th. If successful, they will then fly to Athens in July to represent the UK.
“I wished I had the confidence and skills of these young people when I was 17 – their fearlessness and commercial acumen is very impressive,” commented Tony Hague, CEO of PP Control & Automation.
“Tag-Along is obviously the team that is competing in the national finals of Young Enterprise, but there were also two other companies FlashStash and Attachify – I supported. They were equally impressive and won several awards in the Shropshire competition, demonstrating the fantastic talent we have coming through into the business world.
The award-winning young entrepreneurial team behind Tag-Along.
“Young Enterprise is a fantastic programme, giving young people the opportunity to put some of the theory learned in class into a real-world, commercial project that can give them experience and skills for later in their career.”
At the National Finals, Newport Girls’ High School will have to write a company report, present it and then be grilled by a team of high-profile judges.
Tag-Along has already been praised in the early rounds for providing a solution for carrying multiple items on your bag. It was initially designed to support the sports market, but the creative entrepreneurs quickly realised it could also be a godsend for parents with children and businesspeople rushing to and from meetings.
With deals already struck with two football clubs and other commercial partnerships in the making, judges said that the product offered fantastic ‘scalability’.
“The Young Enterprise journey has been an incredible experience for us – from creating the product and developing the brand to negotiating with suppliers, agreeing manufacturing deals and securing sales,”
added Tulsi Mistry, the 17-year-old Managing Director of Tag-Along.
“All of this has been done from scratch, with many of us not knowing each other before the project. We’ve worked out our individual skills, ‘who was good at what’ and pooled it all together to come up with an award-winning product that first won the Shropshire finals and then the West Midlands, beating 13 other teams in the process.”
Early users quickly found Tag-Along to be a useful accessory for carrying footwear hands-free
She went on to add: “We’ve had lots of excellent support from our Young Enterprise Mentor Tony Hague, who has given up so much time to provide us with his commercial insight and knowledge of negotiations and sales.
“All eyes are now on representing Shropshire in Manchester in June and hopefully on the global stage in Athens.”
Involvement in Young Enterprise is part of PP Control & Automation’s long-term commitment to ‘giving back’.
The company has recently established an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) committee to embed sustainability across its operations and this brings together purchasing and supply chain, logistics, HR, IT and Senior Operations and Marketing.
This will guide the activity going forward, including the launch of a new campaign due to be announced in the next month.
For further information or to buy Tag-Along, please visit https://www.ye-tradingstation.org.uk/product/tagalong.
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?
