The “Made in Sheffield” mark was once so famous that, as local legend has it, East-Asian steel firms trying to get into the cutlery trade used to stamp it on their own knives and forks. But those cheap foreign producers eventually edged out the British firms. Most of Sheffield’s blast furnaces went cold in the 1980s, and the famous mark is not so famous now.

Employment fell and poverty spread. Sheffield, and the surrounding areas of South Yorkshire, were harder hit than anywhere in Britain by the demise of traditional metal-bashing. Now, however, the city’s newspapers are trumpeting the claim that Sheffield is back on the world manufacturing map.

Last week, Insight Enterprises, an American computer retailer, said it was going to spend Ј84m building its European headquarters in the city. It is promised to bring about 1,700 jobs, a third of them in software design. But a much smaller project is generating much more excitement – the arrival of Boeing, an American aircraft maker.

Boeing, which last week announced that it was moving its headquarters from Seattle to an unknown destination, is spending Ј3m in co-operating with Sheffield University to set up a Ј15m research centre employing only 100 people looking into new metal-cutting technologies using materials such as titanium. Such a small sum does not sound much to get excited about. But Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency, is very excited indeed. It has designated the site where the Boeing centre will go, a reclaimed slagheap halfway between Sheffield and Rotherham, as an advanced manufacturing park. In five years’ time, it boasts, Boeing and the other companies it hopes to lure to this site will have created 7,000 jobs.

Although the job forecast may turn out to be optimistic, there are indeed signs of new life manufacturing in the area. British Aerospace Systems and Rolls Royce are expected to follow Boeing shortly. The key to all three companies’ interest in Sheffield is the university.

Tales of the collapse of Sheffield’s metal-bashing industry have been somewhat exaggerated. There is still a lot of it about. Although it employs only a sixth as many people as it did 25 years ago, it produces only 10% less than it did in 1975. And, alongside the manufacturing base, the local university has kept up its metals-research capability. Rolls Royce, for example, has designated three teams at the university as “centres of excellence” researching, for instance, vibration clamping, and has signed five-year contracts with them.

The credit for spotting that this co-operation could have big potential belongs not to Yorkshire Forward, but to a Sheffield businessman and a professor. Two years ago, Adrian Allen, group sales director of Technicut, which makes precision-cutting machine tools, decided to try to sell some machines to Boeing. He took Keith Ridgeway, Sheffield University’s head of design and manufacturing, to Seattle with him. They failed to make a sale; but while researching his pitch, Mr Allen noticed Boeing’s press notices explaining that the company was looking to collaborate in research with suppliers to cut costs and improve quality.

Mr Allen saw an opportunity. “Selling an existing product to Boeing is impossible; you have to get involved with their manufacturing process,” he says. Mr Allen noticed that the government was offering subsidies to set up regional industrial-innovation centres. He and Mr Ridgeway cooked up the idea to put Boeing and one of these centres together in Sheffield. Mr Allen said he did not get very far with his idea until he invented an attention grabbing acronym for it: SYCOE or South Yorkshire centre of excellence. “ People said to me “Are you mad?” - but they listened.” Boeing’s importance to Britain was part of Mr Allen’s pitch. It is one of Britain’s biggest manufacturing customers: in 1999, it bought $2.9 billion worth of components – 38% of Boeing’s total component bill – from Britain. That helped Mr Allen convince the Department of Trade and Industry, which came on board along with Yorkshire Forward and Sheffield’s various development agencies. Boeing bought the idea because of the quality of work going on at the university. If things go well, the research centre will be just the beginning of the benefits Boeing will bring.

The company wants to outsource more production, to concentrate on areas where it can add most value. Jimmy Williams, Boeing’s head of manufacturing-process improvement, says, “We want the technology to transfer to supplier firms. As it transfers, those suppliers will become very competitive.” In other words, as Boeing gets better products out of Sheffield, so manufacturers will be better-placed to sell their products to firms such as Lockheed and Airbus Industries. Which is why 300 people from the British aerospace industry attended a recent seminar at Sheffield University about the research centre.

There is a pleasing symmetry in this story, for Sheffield’s previous fortune was born out of research. In 1912, Harry Brearly, a former student working in laboratory in Sheffield, discovered how to make stainless steel. Production began three years later. The rest is history.

Source Publication: The Economist, 31 March 2001
Last updated: 27/04/01 13:23:00