UK’s leading manufacturer of injection moulded plastic cisterns and water control valves for the bathroom sector. Turnover £20m. Employees 270.
Design Manager
To lead and manage all new product development activities from conception of ideas to launch onto the market with use of an in-house design team.
Traditional markets were diminishing and there was no process for identifying future product or market opportunities. Introduced a process, organised and chaired meetings which enabled ideas to be identified and filtered according to their potential commercial viability. We were able to remain competitive in established markets and secure contracts in newly identified growth markets.
The design team was continually called to the assembly floor to resolve production quality issues. Introduced a part product approval process which dramatically reduced the number of queries from production, and in turn reduced the number of customer quality complaints by 80%.
Modifications were carried out to parts without a complete understanding of whether the change would resolve the underlying problems. Introduced a controlled modification process starting with the identification of the root cause of the problem and concluding with an approval of the product prior to release. Weekly modifications meetings were reduced from 90 minutes to 15 minutes and due to a focused team approach the number of open issues was reduced by two thirds at any one time.