Why Renishaw Centres? (1)
The Renishaw Centre for Manufacturing Productivity is a collaboration between the University of Greenwich and Renishaw plc.
Renishaw is one of the UK's leading high technology manufacturing companies, with annual sales of around £200 million (of which around 94% is accrued overseas), and some 1,800 employees, of which over 1,100 are employed in the UK.
The key to Renishaw's success is its core business strategy of investment in innovation, both for commercial products and manufacturing processes, and it ranked 5th in the 2007 R&D Scorecard for FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies published by UKTI, with over 17% of its gross turnover invested in research, development and engineering.
However, innovation isn't just about investment and a long-term management perspective; it's also about skills. Renishaw is an end-to-end business, carrying out its own R&D, manufacturing, sales and support, and unusually, it retains the majority of its manufacturing, including all of its machining, in the UK. Whilst no company can ignore the labour and logistic cost advantages of moving production to lower cost economies, Renishaw demonstrates that it is more than possible to thrive as a UK-based manufacturer if modern thinking is applied.
The company strongly believes that UK engineering firms must focus on knowledge-intensive solutions, engineered to a high standard and produced with robust, automated manufacturing processes. It has proven this approach at its own machine shop in Gloucestershire, where it uses its own products to monitor and control machines, allowing for an exceptional level of automation and quality. Also through its global base of customers, Renishaw is able to observe manufacturing excellence in fields as diverse as aerospace, medical, electronics and renewable energy production.
Over the last few years, Renishaw has distilled its accumulated knowledge into a model that it calls the Productive Process Pyramid™. This provides a systematic approach to the identification, minimisation and control of variation in machining processes, enabling companies to develop the robust, automated processes that they will need to be globally competitive.
The company quickly realised the value of these skills to the wider manufacturing community, but also quickly realised that it was not best placed to deliver courses on a national basis. Therefore Renishaw wanted to identify higher educational establishments with whom it could work to extend its original 2-day training course upwards to produce Foundation Degree modules, as well as downwards to provide NVQ-accredited introductory education aimed at school leavers and Engineering Diploma students. The aim was that these courses would also mesh well with the National Physical Laboratory's (NPL) Metrology training framework.