CAR INDUSTRY
“
I can’t stress enough how important cross-functional teams are in driving quality
through the business and being solutions-orientated is.
”
Michael Kerr, Vice President and Chief HR Officer, Aston Martin
DBX: Aston Martins first SUV
Relocation and talent mobility at Aston Martin For talent mobility within Aston Martin, a team of HR, procurement, engineering and finance expertise, underpinned by HR’s day to day responsibility, oversees the strategic direction of Aston Martin’s expansive relocation programme. This encompasses a range of temporary
and permanent moves, both domestically and internationally, and a very small number of expatriate moves. “We don’t have a mass of people relocating abroad. The number of expatriates we have is very small. There are lots of historic reasons around that – for cost as much as anything else. “In that sense we haven’t been big enough
or had the money like other players in the global auto industry who would do a lot of assignments. But, in recent months, we’ve sent a finance director to work out of our American office with the American team as part of her career development, which is something that the business also needs.”
From Warwickshire to the Vale of Glamorgan Domestically, it is a different story. With preparations well underway to open the new state-of-the-art St Athan facility, Aston Martin hired its first cohort of 70 people from the surrounding area who will work primarily in manufacturing roles. “For us, this is a massive step
forward,” says Mr Kerr. “We have never had a second manufacturing plant on the scale that we have now and our plant at St Athan is getting on for the same size as our plant here at Gaydon.” Until the new plant
transforming the business through a five- point plan that emphasises collaboration and co-operation, continual improvement, communication and continuous learning. “I want Aston Martin to be a people
company,” says Mr Kerr, who before joining Aston Martin was HR director of West Ham United, a premier league football club built on the success of its team. “In terms of doing that – and there is
nothing new or unusual in our approach to this – we set out a vision, planned around it, designed the processes, thought about
the brand and our values, and applied all this to the manufacturing. “Quality is critical in the luxury sector
and we can only achieve that through our culture. It cuts through everything we do. The responsibility for creating quality doesn’t sit in one place. This is why we don’t do anything now without getting a cross-functional team together. “I can’t stress enough how important
cross-functional teams are in driving quality through the business and being solutions-oriented is.”
opens, the company is training these colleagues in the Aston Martin Way at Gaydon, Warwickshire. “This group will return to St Athan early in the new year, and start to assist in the
training and recruitment and the pilot build of prototypes as we gear up to full-scale production,” says Mr Kerr.
Relocation challenges Inevitably, with an average two-hour commute between the two sites, this raised the challenge of how to accommodate people during this temporary arrangement – a problem exacerbated by the relocation of some IT roles permanently to South Wales from Warwickshire.
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