Aerospace supply chain offered funded competitiveness improvement

Above: Oxley Group celebrating winning a 2019 Sharing in Growth best practice award.

Twelve of Sharing in Growth’s current participants will be exhibiting at the show which brings together senior international trade and military experts from across the global supply chain.  By working with Sharing in Growth (SiG) to transform their businesses, these programme participants have, between them, secured more than £350 million in contracts.

SiG’s 100 business coaches, backed by a bank of world-leading experts, help companies tackle their individually diagnosed barriers to growth and, for many, double their turnover. Participants in the Sharing in Growth (SiG) programme have secured more than £4 billion in contracts over the last five years by improving their leadership, culture and operational capability.

An independent, not-for-profit programme, Sharing in Growth is supported by the Regional Growth Fund and by more than £150 million in private investment. Over 60 companies, with some 10,000 employees, have benefitted from the Sharing in Growth programme across the UK.

Now, as some of its earliest participants ‘graduate’ from the programme, new places have become available to ambitious companies who need SiG’s expertise to show them how, typically, to address a 20% cost gap and a 50% productivity improvement.

Among the firms exhibiting is Oxley Group which specialises in LED lighting, night vision solutions, EMC filters, interconnect components and data capture products. The company was selected for the Sharing in Growth programme in 2018. To grow its business by focussing the whole team on the customer, Cumbria-based Oxley realised it needed to ensure everyone had the knowledge, skills and understanding to support the growth strategy.

So, Oxley launched and communicated its vision, mission and values, created a two-way communications team, ran team engagement programmes, and used a business development information centre and a lighthouse cell to improve understanding and empowerment. Employee engagement has soared, company finances have turned around, and the company has won recognition from stakeholders and potential customers alike. Their ambition is now to double their turnover in five years and then triple it in ten years.

Similarly, in 2016 the leadership at G&H Glenrothes set out to be the customers’ first choice for precision optics by improving their competitiveness and doubling their sales growth as part of the SiG programme. In 2018 this meant achieving a 23% increase in output in 12 months.  SiG’s coaches helped them develop their people and processes to drive the sales and quotation process, make operational changes to eliminate waste and improve process flow. Not only did G&H Glenrothes achieve their revenue target, but they also made sustainable change to take their business to the next level.

Said G&H general manager Mark Merigot: “The Glenrothes team faced the monumental challenge of increasing output by 23% in a year. With huge support from Sharing in Growth’s experienced coaches, the team stepped up, took a disciplined approach to define, measure, analyse, improve and control their processes and achieved a fantastic 29% growth and, by doing so, set an important baseline upon which to improve further.”  

Endorsed by Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, Bombardier, GE, GKN, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, MBDA, Rolls-Royce, Safran and Thales, the SiG programme provides funded support with a value up to £300k per year for three years.

To qualify for the programme, companies need to be aerospace suppliers, have genuine ambition to grow and be able to release their teams for on-site coaching, training and mentoring. 

Said Sharing in Growth CEO Andy Page: ”We’ve now supported over 60 beneficiaries to secure more than £4 billion in contracts two years ahead of schedule. This is equivalent to over 7,000 jobs so we are well on target to safeguard 10,000 UK jobs by 2020.

“Our programme is effective because it has the unique scope and scale, commensurate with the challenge of helping programme participants to win a larger share of the global aerospace market. We provide funded, bespoke, independent training, coaching and mentoring to improve companies’ management and operational capability so that they win business which they can then invest further in their skills and infrastructure to win even more business.”


To find out more about SiG, visit programme participants at DSEI or www.sig-uk.org/apply