As both the UK government and the ADS industry association are eager to remind anyone who is interested, the UK aerospace sector has a 17% global market share, making it the number one aerospace industry in Europe and globally second only to the USA.
All told, the industry generates an annual revenue of around £24 billion ($39 billion) and does wonders for the UK’s trade balance, as it exports three quarters of what it produces. And, critically, the industry supports 100,000 UK jobs directly and another 130,000 indirectly – supporting more than 3,000 companies.
A range of government-industry joint initiatives have thus understandably been underway for many years – the next generation single-aisle airliner technology development scheme stands out as a good example of a long-running collaboration between major suppliers, with government financial support. However, a deeper partnership was sealed in 2012, with the launch of a national industry strategy – Aerospace Growth Partnership (AGP).
Such schemes are often easier to launch than sustain, but the AGP is noteworthy for two reasons.
One, there is a significant amount of money involved – around £2 billion, split between government and industry – to create an Aerospace Technology Institute. This perhaps-belated UK answer to NASA, France’s CNES or Germany’s DLR is a very modern concept. Some bricks-and-mortar facilities will be built, including a £60 million aerodynamics centre. However, the ATI is, essentially, a virtual institute with a skeleton staff that knits together university and industry research projects to advance technologies deemed useful across the industry.
Second, the AGP stands out because, around 18 months after its launch, it is still regularly mentioned in conversations as important.
However, one critical piece of the puzzle is just now coming together. As the AGP launch document noted: “A characteristic of the industry is its large-scale need for a broad range of high-value skills and disciplines, including engineering, science, project management, production, service, training and finance.” Without those skills, the supply chain – characterised by a large number of small- to medium-sized companies – is seen as likely to fail to keep up with the demands of big players like Rolls-Royce or GKN, whose aerospace head, Marcus Bryson, leads the ADS’s aerospace section.
Enter another acronym and tick off another chunk of money: SIG, for Sharing In Growth, and £50 million from the government. The four-year programme – being billed as a £110 million scheme, with the rest coming as in-kind contribution from the top end of the supply chain – is designed to provide training, largely in management, to the small-medium enterprises (SMEs) whom that supply chain depends on.
SIG chief executive Andy Page has been seconded from Rolls-Royce, where he was an engineer ultimately responsible for supplier development, to run the programme. The idea, he says, is to identify 40 suitable companies looking for help to grow with the industry and provide them with intensive onsite training. Since its launch in November 2013, SIG has been holding road shows and taking applications to identify companies it believes it can help.
So far, around 15 have been signed up; a couple were rejected, says Page, because their business cases “didn’t stack up”. A few have rejected SIG, for example because they decided that they were already on track for growth.
The first step in the programme is to identify problems. However, stresses Page, SIG is different from consultancy in that it does not stop there. Indeed, he says, 80% of the spending will come “downstream”, as SIG’s experts work with participants to implement change.
SIG expects to make use of 100 experts in disciplines like process engineering and supply chain management seconded full-time from large companies – Rolls-Royce is obviously one of them – as trainers, or mentors. What they will be focused on, says Page, is helping SMEs make the leap in management style, and he sees it as a leadership issue, needed to move from start-up to mid-cap scale.
Most of these companies, he adds, are build-to-print operations, and growing beyond that stage is not easy. What it takes, he says, is “a nice, joined-up” look at technology, capital, finance and management – and that is where the top of the supply chain should, at least in theory, be able to help.
SIG hopes to help its 40 “pupils” grow enough to create 5,000 jobs, says Page: “We think the government is doing something braver than they’d normally do.”
Source: FlightGlobal.com
