Operational excellence
Our emphasis is on delivering high-quality projects and reducing costs by driving excellence through our core business processes.
Strategic priorities
Drive operational improvements and efficiencies
The objective is to improve our level of automation (through Project Horizon) and to further enhance the Group's risk assessment, operational and contract management processes (through our ongoing operation improvement programme).
Invest in market-leading technology
We will make this investment in the short and medium term to support the Group's ongoing requirements and growth.
Achievements in 2023
During the year we have continued our drive to reduce costs and upgrade our fabrication capacity and efficiency. This has helped us offset many of the cost pressures that were experienced by the Group in 2023.
We launched Project Horizon, our digitisation programme, to modernise and further standardise processes and systems across the group. The objective is to maximise the automation of our estimating, design, productions and contract delivery process to improve customer service and increase efficiency. Further details on Project Horizon.
We made good progress with our innovative approach to drawing and design, including the automation of repetitive tasks and the optimisation of engineering software. We have also developed engineering apps and rolled out a number of digital quality assurance initiatives, together with ongoing roll out of mobile devices to capture information at the point of use and to provide live information to both operatives and management.
We continued the expansion and automation of our fabrication capability and the ongoing improvements to real-time factory information at our main centre in Dalton. This included 'right first time' initiatives to improve overall quality including the targeted reduction of factory and site NCRs (rework items) and drawing office errors.
Objectives for 2024
Continue with our operational improvement initiatives to maintain the Group's focus on business improvement and efficiencies, further optimising processes within our factories and production lines.
Roll out further Project Horizon initiatives and workflows – we have c.100 projects either ongoing on planned over the next 2 years to either generate cost savings or create additional capacity in our workforce to help us delivery on our growth aspirations. These include looking at new and innovative ways of working and the optimisation of our software systems to reduce manual tasks.
Further investment in capital expenditure across the Group to make our businesses more competitive and operationally efficient. We will continue to invest in excess of depreciation.
Maintain our current momentum with reducing our scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas ('GHG') emissions. This includes the switch to 'green' electricity at all our production facilities and other ESOS related improvements, the monitoring of our new waste reduction targets, increase the use of hydrogenated vegetable oil ('HVO') fuels and the transition to electric and hydrogen construction plant where possible.