9APRIL, 2021Carl Morse, General Manager of MADG Advanced Composites comments:"Our investment in our people, technology and processes has allowed us to become an extremely agile and flexible team who can change requirements from concept to the point of delivery. We restructured during 2020, embedding our man-ufacturing cells with multi-disciplined teams including quality, engineering and process engineering. These teams are fully empowered to make decisions dynamically, which creates a better col-laborative working environment and im-proves customer quality and deliveries."MADG has invested significantly in reviewing many of its key process-es and value streams, achieving a 10% improvement in productivity to date through its` One Marshall Continuous improvement Programme' (OM-CI), which aligns to the approach used by the World Class Manufacturing Asso-ciation. This programme has delivered significant improvements on cost and on time delivery to its customers.More impressive still, given these improvements have been driven against the backdrop of Covid-19 with the challenges of ensuring a Covid-Secure workplace. The company has taken a robust approach to taking care of its people throughout the pandemic and has recently introduced a weekly testing programme to help identify any asymp-tomatic cases within its workforce.As well as manufacturing face vi-sors for its own use, the team at MADG also produced a further30,000 which were donated to critical workers in its local community.Like so many manufacturing businesses, MADG found itself faced with the challenge of mobilising as many as pos-sible of its employee to work from home, making collabora-tion much more challenging and putting physical distance be-tween key team members and the manufacture of its products.This dictated an immediate adaptation that overnight drove the use of conferencing and real-time video linking onto the shop floor to maintain efficiency.MADG has invested heavily on Research and Develop-ment and has dedicated R&D teams across the business to ensure it remains competitive and able to provide the most relevant solutions to its customers.The Kirk by moorside facility has been fortunate to re-ceive backing from Sharing in Growth (SIG), who awarded a £900k grant over three years to support the development of their processes and people. The SIG scheme provides a con-centrated and targeted approach focusing on the development of lean techniques, manufacturing operations, procurement, cost modelling and leadership devel-opment enabling the business to be-come `world class'.A key area of focus during 2021 is the National Aerospace and Defence Contractors Accreditation Program (NADCAP). Developing people and processes are key for Aerospace and defence providers and demonstrates robust processes with people trained to the highest standards with the add-ed benefits of utilising technology and videography.Carl Morse continued:"We have capitalised on these in-vestments to grow capabilities and increase offerings into the market. One example is the development of our extensive composite capability to include the design, manufacture and certification of Radomes, whilst increasing our intellectual property material database in line with mar-ket requirements and identified novel and more expedient routes to certifi-cation."Coupled together, this has ena-bled us to provide improved service levels to our customers across the entire life-cycle - from supporting requirement generation, using expertise to inform key design for manufacturing de-cisions, through to design, test, manufacturing, certification and end of life considerations."MADG Advanced Composites is still growing, trying to do things differently and challenging the norm. This is a fast-paced industry and the team acknowledge the need to con-tinually reassess and improve, offering something different, whether its increasing new capabilities to customers, new or enhanced processes to improve quality and turn-around times or using novel approaches to reduce cost. These initiatives will continue throughout 2021 and beyond as the business continues to meet the challenges the dynamic aerospace and defence sector has to throw at it. Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group (MADG) ­Advanced Composites is ensuring it's fit for 2021 and beyond through a programme of continuous improvement and supported by significant ongoing investment in both its people and processesMark Follows
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