Interview
10 minutes with... Ketlyn Silva
Quality and R&D manager at Marshall-Tufflex.
Tea or coffee? Coffee.
Glass half full or glass half empty? Always half full.
Working from home or working from the office? Working in the office alongside my colleagues in the Quality and R&D team.
What does your current role entail and how long have you been doing it? I am the Quality and R&D Manager for Marshall- Tufflex. I joined the company in 2021 as quality manager. In January this year, my role evolved to take on a wider remit when the new Quality and R&D department was formed. In this position, I am responsible for looking after quality, process improvement and environment as well as our product design department. We are focused on improving manufacturing processes to provide maximum quality and consistency across the Marshall-Tufflex portfolio.
How did you get started in this industry? I studied Chemical Engineering at university. After I graduated, I worked in the plastics product manufacturing industry in Brazil for several years before switching to the automotive sector.
Later on, I received an MSc in Engineering and Materials Science from Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina. In 2021, my husband, Jean Dias, was appointed as Marshall-Tufflex’s operations director, so we relocated from Leicester to East Sussex. His enthusiasm and passion for working at the company and its sustainability credentials were inspiring, so when the role for a new Quality Manager became available, I jumped at the opportunity.
What roles were you doing before and how did they prepare you for this one? I previously worked as an advanced product quality planning engineer and a quality and process engineer, which gave me a strong background in quality assurance, process improvement and environment.
What do you believe are the main challenges facing the electrical industry at the moment and what is Marshall- Tufflex doing to overcome these? Supply chain stability has been a real issue. Both the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine have caused a lot of disruption and created challenges for the whole industry. Thanks to the strong relationships we have with our suppliers, we have been able to maintain a good supply of materials
to reduce the impact on our ranges. We are also building new relationships with suppliers in Europe, South Africa and Asia to grow our network and further reduce the impact of these sorts of events.
Can you tell me about the company’s new ESG commitments over the past year? As part of our environmental commitments, we officially launched our journey to Net Zero in August, and we’ve already taken a number of steps to reduce our emissions, including the installation of EV charging points at our head office. Our Net Zero strategy is to Measure, Reduce and Offset residuals. To achieve our goal, we will be looking at three different kinds of carbon emissions, such as our fleet, energy, gas, fuel consumption, and waste and supply chain management (these are categorised by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol as Scope 1, 2 and 3). Our Net Zero journey is a natural step since we have been using recycled material in the manufacturing of our products for over 25 years. We produce in excess of 4 million metres of conduit alone each year, and the use of recycled material in these products has prevented the equivalent in weight of 300 double decker buses of PVC-U going to landfill annually. In fact, it is our vision that all cable management products installed in buildings
30 | electrical wholesalerOctober 2023
ewnews.co.uk
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