Make your team fit to win

In the office and at home there have been unprecedented challenges and thousands of people have had to pivot, redirect and improvise just to keep on top of things.

Amid all that effort and stress it is important to look after yourself – maybe get a health check to make sure everything is working as it should and then maybe a few sessions at the gym to get the endorphins pumping again after months of WFH.

So if it makes sense for you, why not try it for your business?

Less than three years after it was set up, Fitfactory, based at Fusion Hive in Stockton, is working with more than 400 engineering and manufacturing businesses, steering them through a digital transformation with a comprehensive suite of software, expertise and services to develop and deliver an ecosystem to improve their processes, get insights into their own businesses and help them become leaner and fitter.

Group MD Jason Pritchard

Group MD Jason Pritchard says the goal is to help them become more agile and more productive. As he told me, the world is getting more complicated, but that doesn’t mean your business has to as well.

His arrival at Fitfactory came at a time when digital adoption was making the business headlines, with one report saying the UK was in the bottom six per cent for take-up. For someone with a digitally-focused mind like Jason, there was clearly a job to be done.

“Historically, our industrial landscape is predominantly run by SMEs compared to a lot of other countries where they have larger tiers,” he explained.

“Companies just did not want to change and some still don’t want to change – like aerospace companies who still use floppy disks, pen and paper for order books and Excel spreadsheets.

“So I was headhunted by Tom Dawes who is our CEO. He had built up a multitude of different companies and they all had some aspects of digital transformation for engineering and manufacturing. He told me that he was looking for somebody to come in and reshape Fitfactory.”

After four months, the level of transformation he would be working on with clients was starting to have an effect on his own business, as cultures, values and processes were updated. Tom was so pleased he offered Jason the role of Group MD, which meant that the SCALE era could begin for the whole group – Valuechain Technology, DNA.am, Vision Intelligence and SMS Tech.company.

Standing for Streamline, Connect, Analyse, Level-up, Extend, the systemSCALE is now embedded at the heart of the Fitfactory offer to clients:

Streamline manufacturing operations through software.

Connect your factory across people, plant, products, processes and partners.

Analyse real-time data to generate actionable insights and optimise performance.

Level-up customer service by sharing real-time data upstream and downstream.

Extend your supply chain ecosystem to increase resilience and mitigate risk.

“My group role was always the plan we had agreed, but it was just implemented earlier because we had managed to achieve what we needed so early on,” said Jason.

“I could see how each one of our products would add value and remove the barriers for our sales team, so by starting to bridge that gap and having a group MD we can then start to join up that thinking, remove wasted resource which was happening when one company was maybe focusing on aerospace and then one of our other companies was in the same sector and two different conversations were going on.

“I knew that by me having an overarching view, I would be able to start to start to link it all together, so we sat down and looked at every process within the organisation, just as we do with for every one of our clients.

“We are an SME with 60-plus people, we’re growing steadily and the North East was the big space we wanted to grow into, using SCALE as our mantra.

“One of the vital things that’s helped us with that is the continuous development within the board, where we’ve taken on trusted partners like DER (Driving the Electric Revolution) and Liverpool John Moors University and brought in new members like non-executive director Robert Bell who have a with a fresh pair of eyes, helping us to move away from being an R&D-type company into a commercialised operation.

“Finding those ideal people to join us has been a huge challenge.

“This time last year we started with only me in this one office at Fusion Hive, but we are now ten with other positions open and we have two offices in Fusion Hive and have just signed up for a third. We’ve recruited marketing managers, directors, implementation consultants and are starting to look at the apprentice route.”

So from the boardroom to the teenage starter, Fitfactory has assembled the perfect team with the perfect SCALE processes practised and perfected to answer the myriad needs of North East businesses, large or small, in crisis or growing.

As many of those will know, with every new emerging technology comes a long queue of providers offering their unique take. So businesses need to have a clear roadmap in place before investing, otherwise where manual processes previously caused inefficiencies, it could now be the communication between different digital systems which holds them back, and cancels out any short-term gains.

Then gaps appear that need to be mended with manual systems or even more technology. Jason’s team at Fitfactory are cartographers – drawing up those roadmaps away from siloed divisions and into open space where a company can breathe and grow.

Jason explains: “As you streamline your business, you’re then ready to connect other avenues of your business, your shop floor, your delivery yards, your tools.

“Once you’ve done that you’ve got some connected tools, connected deliveries and a streamlined system, so you want to analyse it to make sure its performance is as sharp as possible.

“We’ve got products such as Insights which allow you to take all those silos of datas and bring them together to analyse it. Then once you’ve connected it, once you’ve analysed, you’re now ready to level up and share it all with a wider community to increase visibility across the supply chain.

“Now you are in a position to extend your business – perhaps you are in automotive, but you want to see if you’ve got any synergies with nuclear or with windpower.”

Another fascinating tool they have in their kit is digital twinning, where they can build a Virtual Learning Factory to show what effect SCALE could have.

This involves taking a ‘copy’ of the business, with all of its digital footprint, incomings and outgoings, processes and products and turning into a virtual reality environment where employees can use VR headsets and immersive technology to see where the problem areas are and where money and time can be saved.

So Fitfactory clearly has all the tools to make transformation possible at any company. That enables them to work with a huge range of businesses in any sector, but Jason has a particular passion for enabling SMEs to grow and change contacts into contracts to establish an unmatched foundation of small businesses to underpin the region’s soaring potential.

It is his own early experiences that gave him that insight into how companies tick.

He was born into a service family and when his dad left the Army after doing his 22 years they were all relocated to Catterick, before moving to Red Hall in Darlington.

The youngster didn’t know what he was going to do, and being dyslexic meant he struggled to read and write, so left school with barely any qualifications.

He worked at Homebase on the tills and got promoted quite quickly, but then made some less successful moves and ended up jobless in his late teens. He soon shook himself up and got a job in furniture sales, which revealed his talent for talking to people, selling ideas and goods and constantly learning from the business environment around him.

So backing local businesses was always going to be in his business DNA.

He told me: “One of the key things we’ve always aimed for is supporting the SME underdog 100 per cent.

“We feel the pressure that they have because we see how much work goes into winning an order within the supply chain. The amount of accreditation that they have to go through in order to just supply into the industry and then all of the checks and audits on a regular basis.

“They also do a lot of manual work, so we started to look at how we could develop software to remove manual error or remove the cost or make sure a particular process isn’t duplicated.”

The reason why Jason and his team are so busy is that they are at the epicentre of an economic earthquake as Teesside and the wider region hit new highs of growth and investment and where we live once again becomes a powerhouse showing the way for the rest of the country.

“We help companies all over the country, but it was a no-brainer for Fitfactory’s work to be centred on the North East,” he says.

“I’m from Darlington, so I know how much the area has to offer. So this will now be the head office for the group and we have met the Combined Authority many times and let them know we want to invest, we want to grow and do our bit to help others grow alongside us.

“My next vision which SCALE will take us to, is to be able to buy a building in the next few years and have affordable offices for up-and-coming technology companies where we can start to share tech and utilise all that knowledge that we’ve got.”

Tapping into all that expertise and enthusiasm could be a gamechanger for North East businesses that want to get fitter, faster.