WHAT SHOES AND BEER once were to the economy of St. Louis, knives and forks were to the economy of Sheffield, England.
Sheffield was famous in the 19th century and well into the 20th for the silverware it produced and exported around the world; along the way it gained the nickname “Steel City” for its huge factories that produced steel on an industrial scale.
But like the Gateway to the West on the Mississippi, this northern England town saw many of its industries fade, and its prominence slide, in the decades after World War II.
Now a more promising parallel is emerging. For the past two decades Sheffield has been home to the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), a hub for companies large and small that want to test new ideas, speed the development of new products and processes, and train a generation of skilled workers in sectors including aerospace, transportation, construction and energy.
Backers of an effort to establish the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center STL (AMICSTL) in North St. Louis, including former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, say the AMRC provides the model they’d like to emulate, in part because of its emphasis on workforce training and the revitalizing effect it’s had on the surrounding area. (McPherson wrote about AMICSTL last week, as part of a package of stories on St. Louis’s emerging North Central Corridor.)
Companies with operations at the AMRC’s manufacturing park include Boeing, Airbus, UK defense contractor BAE Systems, UK jet engine maker Rolls-Royce, and UK sportscar maker McLaren Automotive.
The AMRC park sits on about 150 acres, five miles from the center of Sheffield. It was once the site of British Steel’s Orgreave coking plant, where coal was turned into industrial coke used in steel production. In June 1984, during a bitter strike by UK coal miners against the policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Orgreave was the scene of a violent confrontation between police and striking mineworkers.
The AMRC was established in 2001 as a £15 million collaboration between the University of Sheffield and Boeing, with support from business leaders, the UK government and the European Union.
AMRC’s CEO, Steve Foxley, spoke recently with McPherson about the impact the AMRC has had on Sheffield, lessons to be learned, and what lies ahead in the next decade. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.
McPherson: When you talk about the growth and impact of the AMRC, what are the key figures that help tell the story?
Steve Foxley: In terms of headline numbers, we talk about jobs. In the advanced manufacturing park, there are about 2,500 jobs now. Roughly 600 of those are within the AMRC itself; the rest are in our partner organizations. About 66 percent of the jobs at the park are in high-value manufacturing. That means the AMRC is a complete outlier; the UK national average is about 3 percent.
We have attracted over £300 million (about $414 million) of inward investment. The Boeing facility is about £40 million; Rolls Royce is about £100 million; McLaren is also about £100 million.
We have now got over 120 industrial partners — Boeing, Airbus, Siemens, BAE, GKN (a UK supplier of aerospace and automotive components) — developing potential supply chains for Sheffield.
What impact has the AMRC had on the surrounding communities?
We have an AMRC training center which trains apprentices for high-value manufacturing opportunities. All of them start on day one with a guaranteed contract for employment. Three hundred manufacturers have taken apprentices from the AMRC training center; we’ve trained nearly 1,500 apprentices that have gone into the companies I mentioned.
We think that those 1,500 apprentices generate something like 20 million pounds’ worth of income for low-income families in the region. Because they come from a deprived area, they are typically are the only salary-earner in the family household.
What we’re now seeing is community development. About 1,000 homes are being built near the park; another 2,000 are planned. There’s a new train station being built. We’ve got a STEM school (science, technology, engineering & math) being planned — a primary (elementary) school.
That’s the bit we’re really proud of — that whole community impact, around an initial investment (20 years ago) in innovation in aluminum aerospace machining.
What are some anecdotes that best help illustrate the impact of the AMRC?
The Boeing story is really interesting. Boeing has got 11 manufacturing sites around the world; prior to Sheffield it had no manufacturing in Europe. They were looking to build components for the actuation systems on the 737 and the 767 [the components in machines that enable movement]. I believe they were looking to build that plant somewhere in South America.
Through the innovation of the AMRC, we were able to take component manufacture times on gears from two and a half hours to three and a half minutes.
Another area is around factory automation: We were able to shorten process times by 50 percent. What that meant was, it then became economical to build the manufacturing plant in Sheffield. I think we’re the only Boeing manufacturing plant in Europe.
Another anecdote we use is about the value of the asset now. When Professor Keith Ridgway at the University of Sheffield, local businessman Adrian Allen and others started the AMRC, it cost one pound an acre for the land. Now it’s £600,000 an acre on the Advanced Manufacturing Park.
That comes with challenges. We’re looking for developers to develop a whole district; we don’t want that price to be prohibitive for some of the new manufacturing businesses and the start-ups. It’s got its pros and cons.
How important is the aerospace & defense industry to the AMRC overall?
About 70% of our income is aerospace & defense. It’s been a lot higher in the past. We’ve got some horizontal innovation opportunities. Things we’ve developed in aerospace or defense, or even in automotive: We can push that innovation into construction; into medical devices; into food & drink.
There is still a lot of research & development going into aerospace, around things like future propulsion: whether it’s hydrogen, or electric, or sustainable aviation fuel. And around aircraft bodies: new wing structures, new uses of materials. We always find that aerospace leads the way. It has the right culture; it invests more in innovation R&D than other sectors.
How does the AMRC fund itself?
We run what’s called a thirds model. We get a third of our funding directly from government, a third from our commercial partners around their research, and another third from collaborative research programs, where we will put a proposal or bid together with a consortium of industrial partners. We get roughly £15 million from each third. For every pound we get from the government, we try to get two pounds from industry and other research funding sources. We think that’s a healthy model.
What advice would you give to St. Louisans who will be learning more in the coming months about AMICSTL? Is there a ‘reality check’ you can provide, to help manage their expectations?
There are interesting parallels with Sheffield. If you look at the postcode where the AMRC sits, you can demonstrably see the productivity improvement in that postcode. If you try and look at the productivity improvement within Sheffield as a result of the AMRC, it’s negligible. You can’t really see it.
I don’t know if it will be the same for what’s being proposed in St. Louis, but the reality is that a lot of our innovation has an impact outside of the region. All the stuff we do for our industrial partners — yes, a portion of it stays within the Sheffield City region, but the vast majority of it goes outside. And we needed the Sheffield City region to be cool with that. That’s just the nature of a research center like this. You’re not going to capture all of the benefits within the region itself.
Yes, it will have an impact. It will bring investment; it will bring in jobs. But in the grand scheme of things it may not pop up on the radar.
What’s ahead for the AMRC over the next decade?
We sat with all our industrial partners last year – pre- and post-COVID — and asked them: Where do you want us to put our resources in the next decade? So just picking our four main themes:
The first thing they want us to do is more work on digital manufacturing. What they want us to develop is a fully-connected, open-access manufacturing test set for them. And they want it to be an enterprise architecture which is potentially, let’s say 70 percent common, and we then have a 30 percent customization for whether its automotive, or aerospace, or food & drink. They haven’t got one place where they can go see all of that, fully connected, product-agnostic, and have that digital thread all the way through from design into end-of-life recycling and reuse.
The second big area is under the banner of sustainable manufacturing. We think there are going to be some really exciting innovations in the next decade. We’re going to have electric planes, for example. But we know that the climate change challenge is really complicated and multidimensional. What we don’t want to do is deliver innovations now which we’re going to regret in 10 years’ time.
The example I use is Tesla: You buy a Tesla; you’ve got all of the right intentions; and then somebody gives you the fact that it’s going to take you 20 years to drive that car before you actually offset all of the carbon from component manufacture & logistics of getting that car to you.
We want to build another demonstrator test set around circular manufacturing principles and net-zero manufacturing, particularly to help our partners look at the choices they’ve got at the design stage, at the manufacturing stage, at the supply-chain stage. To look holistically in terms of the right choices, and designing for sustainability.
The third thing, with our aerospace background, is all around new propulsion systems: flying electrically; flying with hydrogen; flying with synthetic fuels; sustainable fuels. What are going to be the manufacturing challenges around future propulsion systems?
The fourth is around supply-chain resilience. Particularly in the UK as a result of Brexit, and as a result of COVID, there’s now a very different debate going on about having shorter supply chains. If we are going to look at shorter supply chains, if we are going to look at potentially reshoring certain manufacturing processes back to the UK, we want it to be ‘green shoring.’ How do we make sure that decision has a positive impact on global carbon reduction? –McP–
More stories from McPherson on the North Central Corridor:
- Now Emerging In St. Louis: The North Central Corridor
- North Side Set To Be Home of Advanced Manufacturing Center
- The North Central Corridor: A Gallery of Images
(Header image of Steve Foxley courtesy of the AMRC.)
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