Ireland's call

24 November, 2010

Frank Wilson - Founder and managing director of Ceramicx It gives me great pleasure to share with you that for the past few months Ceramicx has been working with several blue chip manufacturing companies in the service of Ireland’s new manufacturing ICMR competence centre funded by Enterprise Ireland.  Businesses such as Intel, DePuy, Bombardier and Boston Scientific have been helping create a framework that will better serve our manufacturing and industrial future. Needless to say, the events of recent days have made that need all the more compelling. The ICMR and indeed I2E2 has been an interesting experience for us all – brought all the more sharply into focus by the fresh challenges that the nation now faces. In some ways it has been a privilege for me to be the only small to medium sized manufacturing company at the table, in other ways it is a sadness, and a caution. At the risk of being contentious it seems no accident to me that the strongest and most successful economy in Europe – Germany – has by far the largest number of owner-occupied manufacturing businesses in its economy. Owner occupied businesses hold their destiny more closely in their hands – make decisions in a different way and are more likely to remain closer to the ground, to the communities and the national ground in which they grew up in. Part of our current challenge in Ireland involves creating conditions for SMEs to thrive, take risks, and back themselves to make the hard yards. Business skills within large multinationals tend to become very specialized. From what I have learned in the competence center, multinationals have the resources to put people in careers and allow them to drill down vertically for miles and miles, amassing very detailed knowledge, specialization and building residual value in one or two subjects. People who work in a small to medium sized company need, very quickly, to become expert in ‘horizontal drilling’ - looking across the horizon and the environment in order to find solutions faster. They may not always have the very best solution but often the attitude “the enemy of very good is better” has to be taken so the next project or situation can be dealt with. The ideal business I believe has a mixture of both the specialization and the flexibility. This is a very difficult balance to maintain however, without tipping specifically in one direction or the other. It is my hope that through the competence center we at Ceramicx will be able to learn more about specialization and drilling down into a manufacturing process in order to build specialization and residual value into our company for the long-term. Truth to tell, a successful company that lasts the test of time involves both approaches -  the drill-down approach of multinationals to process and manufacturing structure – but also the flexibility of SMEs in relation to markets, sales and general outlook. In these difficult times I would suggest that our economy, the businesses in it - and the Government agencies as far as they can -  need to increase communications work with each other and challenge every small to medium business to do better and build long term value into their companies. Remember that the small to medium enterprise most often has no other place to go but Ireland. We should make the health of Irish SME manufacturing a key focus of our manufacturing revival from this moment on.

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