14th October 2020
Significant growth over the last decade and a £3m sales boost during the previous 12 months have steered PP Control & Automation to one of the main prizes at the Made in the Midlands Awards held by Insider.
We were delighted to be named as the Manufacturer of the Year (under £25m) by a high-profile judging panel, beating off strong competition from excellent businesses, including FFP Packaging Solutions, Purity Brewing Company, Somers Forge and Three Point Design.
The accolade recognised our commitment to investment, with more than £500,000 spent on strengthening the senior management team, integration of automated testing technology and the purchase of bespoke Artos fully automated cable preparation machinery.
This, along with the creation of a dedicated ESD area for electronics and sensitive assembly, has contributed to us achieving 99.92% delivered quality and over 98% on-time delivery – two staggering results when you consider the complexity of managing a supply chain that contains 13,000 part numbers and 500 different suppliers.
Tony Hague, CEO of PP Control & Automation, commented: “The Made in the Midlands Award comes just a few months after we provided the final electrical harnesses for use in the VentilatorChallengeUK consortium, a herculean effort by all of our staff.
“It reinforces our company culture of continuous improvement, personal development and working together to ensure we are the best in what we do. We already work with over 25 of the world’s largest machinery builders and this prestigious title will help us when tendering for new contracts.”
PP Control & Automation, which plays a key role in the supply of fresh milk, keeping mobile phones dry, bagging crisps and helping your favourite F1 team perform, is now setting its sights on adding to its honours when it competes in the Business Desk West Midlands Masters Awards tomorrow.
We will be going head-to-head with Cameron Price in the Medium Business category and will learn whether we are successful during a virtual ceremony. To watch, please register here https://www.thebusinessdesk.com/westmidlands/events/business-masters-west-midlands-2020.
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?
