Sharing in Growth (SiG) recently revealed that productivity gains made through its aerospace competitiveness programme have resulted in contracts worth more than £3 billion.
The announcement was made at a departmental seminar opened by Business Secretary Greg Clark.
SiG is supported by the Regional Growth Fund and by more than £150 million of private investment.
The contracts secured thanks to SiG include an £80 million six-year deal between Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace and Glasgow-based Castle Precision Engineering, which was also announced by Rolls-Royce chief executive Warren East at the seminar.
He said: “There is a national need for competitive and match-fit suppliers who can win work from companies like Rolls-Royce.
“What Castle has done is what we all endeavour to do: look at our costs and how we can reduce them, look at how we increase the quality of what we do, and look at how — through clear leadership, technical and business process innovation — we can make our business more competitive and win more orders.
“Some of this we do ourselves, some of this we do with partners, including Government, and the Government’s funding of SiG has made a significant difference to our supply chain, as well as to others in the aerospace sector.”
Andy Page, Sharing in Growth CEO, said: “Companies who we support to crack the productivity puzzle are competitive and win contracts, giving them the funds to re-invest in people, technology and growth, so that they win even more business.
“SiG is the UK’s largest productivity programme and has the scope and scale commensurate with the size of the challenge.
“Not only has SiG been pivotal in helping participants to secure contracts worth £3.2 billion but we are also well on target to safeguard 10,000 UK jobs by 2022, securing well over £60 of contracts for every £1 of Government
investment.”
Set up by industry in 2012, SiG is endorsed by Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, Bombardier, GE, GKN, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, MBDA, Rolls-Royce, Safran and Thales.
It is helping the UK advanced manufacturing supply chain to become more competitive and win a larger share of global aerospace contracts — typically by addressing a 20% cost gap and targeting a 50% productivity improvement.
There are limited places left on the SiG programme, but companies interested in how it can improve their competitiveness and productivity can register at the Web site (
www.sig-uk.org/apply).