Engineered progression [12/03/2009] From apprentice to director: how did Renishaw's Gareth Hankins achieve it, and what does his role now entail? Andrew Allcock went to find out Gareth Hankins' office is right next door to the machine shop at Renishaw's Stonehouse, Gloucestershire manufacturing facility. It is highly appropriate for two reasons – it was as an apprentice in a machine shop at another Renishaw facility that Hankins started his engineering career; and the purchase, refurbishment and setting up of Renishaw's Stonehouse manufacturing facility is one of his largest ever projects in a management capacity at the company. From apprentice to director: how did Renishaw's Gareth Hankins achieve it, and what does his role now entail? Andrew Allcock went to find out Gareth Hankins' office is right next door to the machine shop at Renishaw's Stonehouse, Gloucestershire manufacturing facility. It is highly appropriate for two reasons – it was as an apprentice in a machine shop at another Renishaw facility that Hankins started his engineering career; and the purchase, refurbishment and setting up of Renishaw's Stonehouse manufacturing facility is one of his largest ever projects in a management capacity at the company. Image:Gareth Hankins, right, in the Stonehouse machine shop Renishaw is a UK-headquartered public limited company, registered on the London Stock Exchange, and trades globally. In the 12 months to 30 June 2008, the company had a turnover of £201 million. Its main activity is the manufacture of probes, which are used with inspection machines to measure components, and also on machine tools to both measure components and tool or workpiece position. Probes are electro-mechanical devices in the main, but laser technology is used in some. The company also makes other products, such as rotary and linear position encoders (visit www.renishaw.com for a complete rundown). Renishaw's headquarters at New Mills, Wotton-under-Edge, Glos, is home to the design and product development, plus pre-production activities. Production machining takes place at Stonehouse, Glos, with assembly undertaken at Woodchester, Glos, in the Republic of Ireland, and also at a small facility in India. Today, as director, group manufacturing services division, 37-year-old Hankins has overall responsibility in the UK for metal piece part machining operations, final assembly operations, capital and material purchases (from raw material through to bought in piece parts), vendor quality assurance, plant and facilities management, plus the Renishaw service centre where probes, for example, are returned for repair/service. He has 12 direct reports, who are concerned day to day with the various individual areas, such as purchasing, vendor assurance, machining, service centre, and assembly – and a total of 560 people report into these 12 (there are some 1,470 UK employees; 2,200 worldwide). Hankins is also responsible for capital investment (eg, machine tools) and contracts (eg, cleaning services), the budgets for which run into many tens of millions of pounds. Purchasing project On the latter, in the last couple of years he has been involved in the setting up of a purchasing operation in India and is now concerned with a similar operation in China. "I have been out to China four times in the last year; have recruited the senior buyer there and we are now building the team." On the capital equipment side, he has just overseen the purchase and installation of a £500,000 surface mount pick-and-place machine at the nearby Woodchester site, while on the buildings and facilities side, he is now involved in a project to evaluate the feasibility of constructing houses on a site owned by Renishaw in Wotton-under-Edge and the refurbishment of another recently acquired site in Gloucestershire. This housing development could represent an unusual in-house solution to reducing the costs of housing visitors and overseas students. There's more, such as the current project to introduce latest generation Enterprise Resource Planning computer system across the various sites, but clearly the breadth of the role is wide. So how does an engineering apprentice get from the shopfloor to this position? Well, a typical young engineer, he would disassemble and respray his push bikes at 10 years of age; he moved on to trials bikes aged 11; watched car rallies and was enthusiastic about motorsport. "I was always very keen to get out of school and go into engineering." So, at age 16 (1988), upon leaving school in Wales, although having achieved good GCSE results, he pursued an engineering apprenticeship, aiming to get some hands-on experience, while wishing also to pursue higher education. Learning about an apprenticeship opportunity with Renishaw was, to some degree, down to chance. However, once he had visited the New Mills site (which then also housed production machining), the choice was very definitely a deliberate one. "I was wowed by the factory. Even then, I could see it was something very different; the way there is focus on closed-loop solutions to avoid problems; the way the company looked to improve processes. I thought that this was very different to what I had seen elsewhere." He spent his first year at college, then returned to the Cwmbran factory, first at machine shop level and then within production engineering, working on such things as process improvement. But his desire to pursue higher education surfaced and, with Renishaw's agreement, he cut short his apprenticeship, with the company sponsoring him for a three-year degree at Cardiff University – mechanical and manufacturing engineering, later to become manufacturing systems and manufacturing management. In between terms, he worked back at Renishaw, either at New Mills or Cwmbran (later closed, with manufacturing consolidated at the New Mills facility). Applied learning Upon graduation, he moved to New Mills as a manufacturing process development engineer involved with the purchase of capital equipment – the introduction of new, non-ozone depleting chemical component cleaning technology within Renishaw's plants globally was one major project, as was the introduction of laser marking to replace labels. "At that time, my sights were set on becoming a senior manager in engineering, but I recognised I needed man-management experience," he explains. Following discussion, in 1995, he became a team leader in an electronics controller assembly area, managing up to 10 people. "I still could get my teeth into engineering problems, but had the added responsibility of getting parts out of the door; managing people, cost, quality, and health and safety issues – things that I had been ignorant of before, but which I really enjoyed." The next move was product group leader in the electronics assembly area, taking in surface mount assembly operations, with 45 people to manage. Then, in 1988, came the move to Ireland as production manager, which, in addition to being a 'bigger' job – 110 people – also introduced a small purchasing element. He managed his way out of the role by putting in place two other managers, making the production manager role redundant and, starting in 2000, spent time on ad hoc projects. This embraced new product development and, latterly, the establishment of the Woodchester assembly facility, which saw the main assembly operation move out of New Mills to the new site. In 2002, he became operations manager in the stylus and custom products division, with an emphasis on design for manufacture to improve deliveries and lead times. This gave him more product design experience, plus greater commercial experience in terms of deciding whether a demanded product was actually viable, and so whether it would actually be made. Involvement in divisional board meetings was another new element. In 2004, Hankins served as roving troubleshooter during a period of high growth and where various constraints had to be tackled; this saw him reporting direct to deputy chairman John Deer. Mid-2005 saw him take on the post of operations manager for manufacturing, and February 2006 brought the move to his current position. Over the years 2004 to 2006, he project managed the Stonehouse facility, which houses a 80,000 ft2 shopfloor; 10,000 ft2 is given over to washing, finishing, deburring, anodising; and there's a further 10,000 ft2 of office space. While Hankins' position takes in a wide brief, the overall objectives for his Manufacturing Services Division are agreed annually with the company's board of directors, and it is these that drive the various projects, although ad hoc projects will occur during any one year – like the possible house-building project, for example.These objectives might include such top-level items as financial performance, quality, customer service levels, productivity, stock levels and customer satisfaction. Under these top-level items will be specific targets, which for the financial area might mean a reduction in production costs or bought in material cost reductions. On the latter, clearly the overseas buying operations will deliver an impact here. Order, order So how is order brought to the process of delivering annual objectives via various projects? Hankins again: "We try to be very structured and ordered in what we do, so there are quite a lot of scheduled meetings and reviews on a weekly, monthly or quarterly cycle. "Every Monday we have a series of diary meetings with individuals. During these we [the 12 direct reports] go through what the week's activities will be and note any problem areas and actions. On Fridays I have production review meetings. This is where middle managers in all departments report on performance achieved and, again, highlight any problems. This will also take in video conferencing with Ireland and India. "Throughout the week I then also have various one-to-ones with managers that report to me, taking in performance reviews. On a monthly basis there will be reviews of particular projects or areas, such as overseas purchasing, and on a quarterly basis I will report to the board on progress against objectives and raise any other issues. "There are also regular structured meetings outside of the others with engineering managers to decide what we should be doing as regards projects. These may be very focused on reducing hourly rates, for example, or might be the development of an idea concerning a new, better way of doing something." The latter comes under so-called DPD – Dreaming; Planning; Doing – and projects will go ahead, or not, based upon a cost-benefit relationship. Focused or DPD, they will be in line with one or more of the top-level objectives. Additional ad hoc meetings that arise will include those with new product development teams. Renishaw has a strong design-for-manufacture ethic which means that the production area, through Hankins and his team, has strong influence in new product and process development. "There is often a conflict between a desired technical solution and the manufacture of that solution at a competitive cost. It may be that a particular solution has to be challenged because of its potential to cause problems in the future." Above this are the larger projects such as the overseas purchasing offices and the building refurbishment projects nearer home, plus there are the inevitable surprises and emergencies. A current example concerns an existing customer using one of the company's higher volume probe products. It is asking Renishaw to improve something that will help in its particular application. This is not a product fault, but because of the significance of the customer, product design changes are being implemented, and these changes have knock-on effects down through manufacturing, assembly and purchasing. Yet another surprise was delivered by the floods in Gloucestershire last year and which flooded the company's Woodchester facility. "I was on my way back from Germany on Friday; got a phone call; went straight there just as water was entering the building; and within an hour was up to my knees in water. We spent the whole of the weekend clearing up but we shipped product on Monday and were back in production by Tuesday lunchtime. Everybody worked very hard. We have subsequently erected flood defences, bunded the building to 600 mm and set up an early warning system." It's a long way from respraying push bikes and an early interest in engineering, but incremental career progression can clearly lead to high responsibility at a relatively young age for an engineering apprentice. First published in Engineering Apprentice, Winter 2008 Related Companies: Renishaw plc