By STUART KLOSINSKI, Industrial development manager for Furness Enterprise

Last updated at 10:14, Wednesday, 08 August 2012

Stuart Kloskinski, industrial development manager for Furness Enterprise, gives advice on sourcing.

PUTTING FURNESS FIRST: Stuart Klosinski, industrial development manager at the Furness Enterprise

SOURCING jobs, contracts and supply partners can be a continual challenge for many businesses, in Furness and nationally.

Last week we enabled Partylite manufacturing of Barrow to meet more than 230 local people who expressed interest in working with the business.

This, another of our highly successful bespoke Jobs-fairs, show the value of our strong emphasis on employer-employment partnership working.

We also alerted Acrastyle to an export opportunity for electrical equipment at the Plomin C coal-fired power station project in Croatia.

The government now recognise a need to move towards sourcing more from within Britain.

In a ministerial speech, Vince Cable said: “We should no longer be thinking in purely national terms when considering competitiveness. Instead, our job is to find ways of supporting good, viable jobs: those where a critical mass of expertise and innovation support high levels of value added.

“For this reason, the government is in the process of developing a coherent industrial strategy that will allow us to get behind our best-performing sectors – those with the strongest trading figures, high value-added, and a proven commitment to innovation.”

Sectors including defence, solid state lighting, tissue manufacture, oil, gas, electrical equipment are some of those a forthcoming industrial strategy should cover to stimulate sourcing from within our own country.

Sourcing also means supporting development of effective long–term supply chain relationships. There are seven basic supplier sustainability solutions open to large and small companies.

They include:

Replace external supply with internal manufacture/assembly; Sustain unique capabilities and facilities by maintaining them in operation; retention of ability to create unique element of capability and facility; expand the market to support the business; concentrate skills and facilities to more closely match demand; change our supply requirements; buy it elsewhere.

Throughout Cumbria its probably fair to say local companies still lose out on winning businesses to companies based outside the county. Supply chains can be dominated by large firms which are not aware of local capacities and capabilities.

Local firms may also not be aware of project procurement strategies, requirements, or may be inadequately equipped to enter and sustain a presence in local and national supply chains, by reason of capabilities, procedures or an unawareness of the potential to collaborate.

Collaboration on supply chain development can result in: Improved affordability and sustainability of businesses; companies delivering a common, coherent understanding of future programmes and challenges they present and foster; New ideas, sharing of good/bad practice, removal of process inefficiencies and new opportunities for continuous improvement.

Sourcing opportunities are being explored with companies such as Optech Fibres of Barrow and by learning from the Danish experience of the Djurs local supplier partnership involved in supporting windfarms.Some of these may result in supplier potential for local firms.

First published at 14:58, Tuesday, 07 August 2012
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk