LOYAL EMPLOYEE LOOKS BACK ON 50 YEARS OF SERVICE THE DIGITAL SKILLS GAP A. In 1969, a lot of major
Since the company launch in 1850, Thorite has been in family ownership. Today, Thorite has grown to become the UK’s largest distributor of pneumatic and compressed air products and process systems with nationwide coverage through a network of wholly owned, Sales and Service Centres. There is no doubt that a company’s
most important asset is its employees, and while there will always be a need to bring in experienced staff, the policy at Thorite has always been to try to promote from within. This policy has certainly worked for marketing & engineering director, Ross Gowler who joined Thorite in 1969, as an apprentice service engineer. After almost fifty years, Ross is
about to take his retirement and, in this interview, he looks back on his employment with Thorite and at the ways that the pneumatics market has evolved over the past fifty years. Q. During and just after serving
your apprenticeship, you were servicing compressors and pneumatic systems. Who were the major industry players at that time and what was the attitude of Thorite’s customers towards maintenance and servicing? A. I joined Thorite Pneumatics Ltd
in 1969. We really were the first distributors of pneumatic products. The ‘household’ names in those days were Norgren, Enots, Martonair, Maxam and Schrader, Ingersoll Rand, Broome Wade, Atlas Copco and a fledgling company called Hydrovane built compressors. Throughout my apprenticeship and, for a while after, I was servicing compressors and building control panels. Many customers were yet to realise the potential of compressed air and would run compressors until they broke down; in some cases, catastrophically. Today that is no longer the case; customers place a much higher value on ensuring reliability and performance. Q. Becoming the largest
independent supplier of pneumatic systems and products in the UK isn’t something that happened overnight. What part did you play in this growth?
companies didn’t yet appreciate what pneumatics could do for their businesses. Manufacturing processes depended on repetitive manual labour. In the early 1970’s I became a junior salesman, visiting companies, explaining the benefits and installing pneumatic automation. Gradually, companies started to appreciate the benefits of low-cost automation that pneumatics could bring. In 1979 I became the sales
manager and we expanded our branch network in Yorkshire with the addition of Sheffield and Doncaster. Soon after, in the early eighties, I was responsible for branches in Lancashire; Rochdale, Bolton and Backburn. We were setting our sights on expansion into a national organisation. Q. Between 1980 and 1990,
industry awoke to the notion that ‘New Technology’ could play a massive role in the way that machines and ancillary equipment were designed. How did this effect the pneumatics industry? A. This was a major leap forward,
just take control panels as an example. Depending on the process, a control panel could be huge. Machine manufacturers were now looking at ways of reducing size and weight. With the introduction of early Programmable Logic Controllers, it was possible to reduce both the physical size of the control panel and its weight. Most importantly though, complex operations became much easier to perform. We designed, built and marketed our own PLC called the Pneutron, it had sixteen inputs and sixteen outputs. Tame by today’s sophisticated standards but game changing then. Q. How did the pneumatics
manufacturers change or adapt their marketing strategies to reflect the opportunities that new technology provided? A. The manufacturers certainly
spent much more on marketing and research & development! As our customers moved away from the old repetitive/manual ways to digital and pneumatic systems, our suppliers regularly launched new products and systems. Screw compressors became
Technology has revolutionised the working world, but given the rapid development of existing and new technologies, are workers gaining the necessary education and awareness of these technological innovations at the same rate? Statistics from Accenture show
that employees are lacking the knowledge needed to meet the demands of a digitally driven organisation. They report that this apparent digital skills gaps could cost the UK £141 billion in GDP growth over the next 10 years.
TheKnowledgeAcademy.com
Ross Gowler, marketing & engineering director
available in the mid 1980’s and these practically revolutionised compressed air generation overnight. Now a factory could run on compressed air 24 hours a day, 365 days a year continuously, needing nothing more than routine maintenance. Q. What do you see as being the
most important development in compressor design in the near fifty years that you have worked for Thorite? A. Without a doubt, reliability and
energy efficiency. Future compressor design will be driven by the ever- increasing cost of energy, the demand for carbon footprint reduction and the need to consider environmental impacts. Q. So, having worked for Thorite
for practically one third of the company’s existence, what is the future looking like? A. Thorite’s head office here in
Bradford isn’t large enough for the expansion that we have in mind, so we will shortly be moving to a new 40,000 sq. ft building not far from where we are now which will provide everything that Thorite needs to continue to grow. Also, we will be opening new Sales & Service Centres in areas where we don’t currently have strong coverage. So much of what Thorite does is
market leading. No other company offers the range of products or level of service that Thorite does. Consolidation isn’t what Thorite is about. I think that the next few years will be exciting.
www.thorite.co.uk
analysed the latest findings from The Open University, who surveyed 500 senior business figures (chief technology officers, HR directors, HR managers) from across the UK to identify the digital skills they think their organisation is most ‘lacking’. The Knowledge Academy found
that the ability to successfully develop and manage a move to cloud-based infrastructure (33%), is one of the two digital skills that senior business figures believe their organisation most lacks. The other digital skill
highlighted is inadequate cyber security (33%) competencies, a worrying statistic given how quickly a severe cyber-attack can cripple business functions and compromise sensitive data. In third position, 31% feel their
firm struggles to integrate new technologies and/or data sources to existing business practices because they don’t have the sufficient ‘know-how’ to do so. Slightly below, 30% state digital naivety in their business is stopping them from embracing potentially valuable emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation. Contrastingly, only 17% of the
professionals say they don’t have enough generalist digital skills in their company, and 20% admit they have a shortage of the expertise required to effectively administer and operate network systems.
www.theknowledgeacademy.com
Tel: 01635 279621 Te Ema l:Email:
eurosales@cwst.com ales@ We t. Web:
www.cwst.co.uk
6 OCTOBER 2019 | PROCESS & CONTROL
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