Suzuki Garphyttan decided to develop the missing product range with the first focus being on fulfilling the needs of the textile industry. Tony Farley, Sales Manager at Site Leeds combined with a responsibility for Business Development for the Suzuki Garphyttan group, was involved from the start:
"One of our existing customers required us to offer a spheroidized annealed product which was smaller than our wire drawing capability in Leeds. Site Garphyttan could meet the dimension requirement but not the batch annealing setup".
Cross-site and cross-functional collaboration
This new textile fine wire project has been one of the first examples of us needing to utilise the different expertise across different departments and sites, that have so much experience, knowledge and ideas. In other words, a cross-functional and cross-site collaboration has been the key here – and much needed in the future if we are to truly speed up our new product development efforts. Tony continues:
"The initiative was at the start dependent on internal collaboration, now, by the transformation of knowledge and new investments we are building the capability to fully meet our customers’ needs from Site Leeds".
This development also had an external dimension when it comes to collaboration. A handful of customers were identified and invited take prototypes for trialling purposes.
"It is encouraging to see that our customers are so open to change and to work together with us with improvements, now it is up to us to be on our toes as a cross-functional team and ensure our operational reality is adjusted as per market expectations", Tony concludes.
