Flexing growth through strategic planning at Keaflex

Overview:

Keaflex, part of the James Walker Group, manufacture precision rubber mouldings. With over 30 successful years in business, Keaflex has sought to improve its operations over the years to keep up with increasing market competition and to become more responsive to customer needs and expectations. Keaflex work with its clients to design the most appropriate and cost effective tooling and manufacturing processes, embracing full 2D and 3D capabilities for product manufacture in order to deliver on both quality and value for money.

Company Sector:

Precision Rubber Mouldings

Number of Employees:

45

Turnover:

£2.3M

Location:

Bordon, Hampshire

Aim of Project:

To excel beyond its previous 30 year history and develop a management level strategic plan of action to develop the capabilities of the company in all areas, including customer service, sales, purchasing, new product development and new business development.  The ultimate goal was to increase turnover and profitability whilst maintaining the future stability and growth of the business.

Scope:

To work with the Managing Director, Andy Tuffield, and the existing team and develop a more substantial change programme beyond the short term gains and encourage the need to address the larger and longer term challenges and opportunities facing the business. To change the current business thinking and practices and develop a plan that embraced change through a combination of senior management team workshops and off-site sessions designed to give the team the space, knowledge, confidence and opportunity to take control of its own growth programme.

Method:

The majority of the existing management team at Keaflex had been with the company for some time and was used to working in a certain way. Therefore, in order to effectively implement a change programme Nik Brown, MAS South East Senior Specialist, designed each workshop to stretch the existing skills and experience of the workforce, backed up by a number of one-to-one mentoring sessions with individual team members.

Nik worked closely with Andy, acting as a sounding board, validating and challenging thought processes whilst bringing new ideas to the table. As a result the change programme was continually adapted to reflect the pace of progress being achieved. Through a number of off-site days, MAS South East facilitated the senior team to create a new company vision, setting long term business objectives that were broken down into functional objectives for each team member to deliver against. 

Key Achievements:

• Company vision and business direction in place
• Strategic commercial business plan in place focusing in customer groups, new markets and new product opportunities
• Operational strategy for whole company developed
• New Business Development Executive recruited
• Functional business areas determined
• Company restructuring implemented to improve overall operations and reflect long term business needs
• Continued improvement activities adopted by senior operations and office team members

“Keaflex has a great relationship with MAS South East and to date we have implemented a number of successful operational improvement projects. The latest MAS South East Strategic Planning Programme has given us a real vision for the future direction of the company. We are now in a strong stable position to confidently move our business forward opening up new business opportunities, delving into new markets and offering up new solutions to our customers – maintaining our profile and position within the competitive precision mouldings industry.”
Andy Tuffield, Managing Director