Leading the march at Heatrod

Heatrod Elements announces the success of its Team Leader Training Programme with five of its shop floor operators successfully moving into team leader positions with management responsibilities for production and warehouse areas.

The programme, which has been run in conjunction with the North West Manufacturers Alliance and The Skills Company, follows an extensive management re-organisation at the Salford based manufacturing company. Heatrod identified a group of individuals who were ready and ambitious to take further leadership responsibilities to become future leaders in the business all of whom have now successfully completed their training.

Simon Ellam, Managing Director of Heatrod Elements said: “Heatrod is a thriving business with growing production and warehousing departments. Part of our growth strategy is to encourage the empowerment of our workforce and to start that process we introduced an externally benchmarked assessment process which helped to identify potential leaders in our factory team.”

Once Heatrod had completed the selection process it introduced a structured training programme which was a combination of tailored training around Lean Manufacturing principles alongside a recognised qualification in leading teams.

Simon adds: “I feel we hit an ideal combination with training from the team at the North West Manufacturers Alliance who gave practical training around Lean, alongside The Skills Company who coached and assessed our staff on the job in their new Team Leader roles”.

As a result of 12 months of training, both on the job and in a classroom environment, all the of the participants in the training courses have now achieved significant progress in their ability to coach and manage their own teams in best practice processes and have recently been awarded ILM NVQ Level 2 certificates in Team Leading.

John Cole, Production Manager at Heatrod, commented, “This is just the start of a longer term process for our team leaders and we have already learnt a lot about each other’s skill sets. This will allow career progression for our shop floor staff and has enabled me to continue to coach them in the areas and skill sets in which we know they need to develop further.

“We are now embarking on intensive cross-training of our shop floor staff and our team leaders are being tested every day in delivering this progress. The benefits of being able to deliver this at all levels within our business is key to our success.”

Heatrod Elements is based in the North West and has been established for over 50 years. As a UK manufacturing business it is focussed on industrial and commercial electric heating for which it produces everything from heating components for machine builders through to project solutions for industrial process heating applications.

The company also imports and supplies domestic heating products from high volume factories which are part of the same group and have been set up outside of the UK. This has fostered a fast growing warehousing and distribution business also based at its Salford site.