The Awards

The Manufacturer of the Year Award
This is the one award you can’t actually enter.  The ‘winner of winners’ will be the company whose across the board progress towards manufacturing excellence is reflected in a healthy balance sheet and growing shareholder value and will be chosen from among the other category short lists.

Leadership & Strategy Award
This award will go to the manufacturing company/plant that, in the opinion of the judges, best demonstrates the value of inspirational leadership and a properly constituted and communicated corporate strategy. This might, for example, have meant recognising and embracing a need for change and providing the kind of leadership, inspiration and discipline to see it through and recognise it as a continuous process.

Design & Innovation Award
The challenge of turning a good idea into a best-selling product has to be met in the laboratory, on the CAD screen, in the modelling shop, on the test bed, and on the factory floor. This award sets out to recognise those who can show how they have become and remained competitive by increasing their rate of innovation, anticipation and responsiveness to ever changing market conditions.

World Class Manufacturing Award
Reaching for world class manufacturing standards means benchmarking and examining everything from lead times to customer returns, from work content to labour minutes per unit, and from inventory levels to cycle times. We know that this can’t all be achieved at once, so as well as considering companies that have already made significant, sustained progress towards being world class, we will also look at those who have made the commitment and got off to an impressive start.

Skills & Productivity Award
Ultimately, it is people who dictate the success or failure of any enterprise. Those aspiring to win this award will need to show how, through recruitment, training, labour relations, HR systems or educational liaison initiatives they have increased productivity while improving the lot of employees and contributing to a reassessment of the public perception of manufacturing itself and the careers and development opportunities it offers.

IT in Manufacturing Award
In a modern manufacturing environment, information management and the technology to drive it are paramount among the facilities and services required across an entire enterprise. The winner of this award will have made significant progress towards the utopia of having designed, implemented and managed an IT infrastructure spanning all its business processes and be able to show returns on the investments it has made in doing so.

Manufacturing Operations Award
What happens on the shop floor and the machines and maintenance programmes that make it happen are, quite literally, the engine room of every industrial enterprise. This award is likely to go to a manufacturer that has a fully joined up approach to its factory operations, that recognises and utilises to good effect the interaction between machines, processing steps and the tasks to be performed. Almost inevitably, this will include methodologies that cater for operational adjustments that need to be made to meet shifting manufacturing and market scenarios.

Sustainable Manufacturing Award
One of the greatest challenges for the manufacturing sector in the years ahead will be developing low carbon operations.
Improving energy efficiency, recycling waste materials, rationalising and cutting back on transport usage, developing
environmental awareness and protecting the local environment are just steps along the way. This award will go to the company that has demonstrated an awareness and assessment of the environmental impact of its overall operations, and has made good progress in, for example, cutting its energy consumption, reducing its carbon footprint and improving its recycling capacity..

Best SME
The UK's manufacturing sector is one of the most efficient, nimble and innovative in the world, and some of the best exponents of innovative design and rapid manufacture, all based around lean and agile processes are SMEs. For too long these unsung heroes of UK manufacturing have been unrecognised. This award will identify key organisations within the SME sector that have delivered remarkable performance and results.