BPIF picks Ryedale Group as national showcase of Advanced Manufacturing
Excerpt from main article:
"PRINTING IN THE 21ST CENTURY:
BEYOND ADVANCED MANUFACTURING
A showcase of companies that demonstrate innovation and the use of cutting-edge technology in the UK printing industry
INTRODUCTION TO ADVANCED PRINT MANUFACTURING
The UK’s print industry is one of the most innovative, efficient and inventive in the world. Worth £14.3bn, it has one of the highest ratios of gross value added in the entire UK manufacturing sector – a stunning £6.4bn. It accounts for the jobs of 140,000 people and 5.5% of the entire UK manufacturing sector. But figures alone tell only a tiny fraction of the story. Print is not just another manufacturing industry. In every major aspect of manufacturing – knowledge, capital, innovation and technology – print is leading the way.
The UK’s print industry is one of the most innovative, efficient and inventive in the world. Worth £14.3bn, it has one of the highest ratios of gross value added in the entire UK manufacturing sector – a stunning £6.4bn. It accounts for the jobs of 140,000 people and 5.5% of the entire UK manufacturing sector. But figures alone tell only a tiny fraction of the story. Print is not just another manufacturing industry. In every major aspect of manufacturing – knowledge, capital, innovation and technology – print is leading the way.
The UK companies featured in this Showcase are best-in-class exemplars, producing some of the world’s most advanced work in print and marketing communications today. There are some common themes: perhaps the most notable is a company-wide drive to anticipate the demands of the customer’s customer – true partnership working at the highest of strategic levels. Another recurring theme is the policy of planning, investing in and developing new technologies years in advance so they are stable, on-stream and ready to roll as demand arises. Yet another is the policy of investing in staff, so that the highest levels of skill push forward the company’s ability to create and innovate world-class solutions.
Collectively, the nine UK print companies featured in this Showcase add up to a masterclass in strategic business vision and advanced manufacturing practice. Yet the principles of their practice are common across the entire UK print industry. In knowledge, capital, technology and innovation, the UK print industry blazes a trail for other industries to follow.
Ryedale Group - Turning science fiction into commercial fact
North Yorkshire’s Ryedale Group is a family-owned global specialist in the printing of plastics. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The £8.5m turnover business has arguably the best record in the global print industry for innovation, currently nurturing several up-andcoming technologies that sound, at first, more like science fiction than commercially-viable fact.
Take, for instance, the group’s investment in digital watermarking. This process, for which Ryedale is currently the UK’s exclusive licence holder in several vertical markets, embeds a unique code in the dot structure of the print. Unlike a barcode or 2D code it’s invisible to the naked eye, but when decoded by a special smartphone app it directs the phone to a related mobile website or other online resources. A recently-launched extension of the technology encrypts a similar watermark into audio files, for use with music. "Clients love the potential,” says Ryedale marketing director James Buffoni. "It has a wide array of marketing applications, but can also be used for security and brand protection, or creative customer communications.” The group spotted the technology 18 months ago while visiting an exhibition, and has invested just a few thousand pounds in the process development so far, "although we think it could be huge for us – technologies like this will change the face of our business,” Buffoni says.
The group’s core specialism – printing onto plastics for plant labels and plastic cards – has seen it acquire a solid bedrock of world-leading technical, design and engineering skills which are used to add value to the customer offering. The group is an Investors in People Gold accreditee, and it is important to the Buffoni family that staff are not only highly skilled, but flexible, working a system of annualised hours that accommodates peak and trough periods without affecting profitability. It is vital, James Buffoni says, to have a good proportion of highly-trained staff: "For a start, we’re in a rural location without a big labour pool, so nurturing our own culture and staff is vital. For another, our turnround times are cut to the bone: if we get an order in that has to be out the door in 48 hours, we can’t afford to wait for a supplier engineer to look at a broken-down machine.” The Ryedale directors went down the lean manufacturing route nearly ten years ago, seeing it as an excellent opportunity to reduce waste. Group operations director Steve Buffoni says the company has an annual target to save £250,000 of waste, whether that’s in materials, operational efficiency or machine time, "and this year we achieved that in nine months.” This year’s main drive, known internally as "One-Hit Wonderful”, is aimed at automating the core MIS functionality with single-instance data entry, to save time and make data more accurate.
Innovation is, in fact, a thoroughly embedded philosophy at Ryedale; the company invests between £50,000 and £100,000 each year in R&D. As well as headline-grabbers like digital watermarking, the company has also developed its own robots to automate a key process (turning two semi-skilled staff into fully qualified robotics engineers in the process), worked with an international press manufacturer to install a state-of-the-art cold-cure UV system, the first of its kind outside Japan, and is leading the development of a new type of board, "not a plastic, but with a lot of the strengths of plastic, including rigidity and waterproofing, but it’s a lot less energy- and resource-intensive to produce and therefore it’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly,” says Steve Buffoni.
Then there’s the printed electronics project: working with a university and another local manufacturer the group has proved the manufacturing feasibility of a groundbreaking new process for producing olfactory sensors: "basically, they’re an electronic nose,” says Steve Buffoni, who recently demonstrated the cost- effective technology accurately detecting the difference between several different brands of whisky. Mindful of the BIS forecast that the global market for printed electronics will be worth $200bn by 2020, Buffoni is currently applying for a Technology Strategy Board grant to take the prototype to commercial production status. "Again, the applications are wide and far-reaching,” he says, citing recent interest from a mobile phone manufacturer in the new technology: "If you embed one into a mobile phone that’s used in the developing world, it could give the user an instant early reading on diseases such as typhoid or TB. We think this could really change lives.”"
Winner of
for Innovation
