How Derbyshire Accelerator benefitted Whitehouse video transcript

[Music]

[Jo Ewart-Sear, Chairwoman, speaking:]
So we're Whitehouse Construction and we are a civil engineering company by trade, but we also undertake property flood resilience works, which essentially is providing domestic properties with resilience against flood water.

The University of Derby have been really helpful and we've got some great contacts there. They initially made us aware of the Accelerator funding and we always knew, you know, we're civil engineers by trade we don't understand processes of manufacturing as well as academics might, so we thought it would be really great to  

partner up and utilise this funding — particularly as this business has grown very organically; we've  

not really had time to sit and think it out. So we thought it would be really good to partner with  

Derby University and use that specific help to make our manufacturing processes slicker and better and  

really, you know, more efficient ultimately, so we can deliver more flood doors and make more units here at this production facility.

[Ian Pitt, Contracts Manager, speaking:]

We've had initial meetings with Hirbod from the head of civil engineering for the University of Derby and we've provided him with information from our door manufacturing processes: the layout of the manufacturing facility, information on the layout of the work areas, assembly areas, storage areas etc.

From all that information, Hirbod will review it, and hopefully provide us with some improvements that we can make to help improve our efficiencies and outputs and the general process. It's just another person looking at it from a different point of view – as Jo says we've sort of grown organically; the industry is still very new in itself, and you know still looking to be mainstreamed by sort of 2025 I think. So there's still a lot to learn in the industry and obviously we want to be doing our best with what we do and this process should help us. So, hopefully out of it will come a lot of improvements that we can make and out of it we'll get a lot of efficiencies and probably more doors and help the people that need it most I guess, that's the bottom line isn't it? It's helping communities and people that's at risk.

[Jo speaking again:]

The impact of the support we receive will allow us to really upscale production here. It's grown very organically to this point and all our efforts and energy have been on making the best product that we can to meet the British standard, which is the BS851188. We've achieved that now so we're now looking what is the next step? And that's really to upscale the manufacture here and really get the best use out of the workspace that we've  got, which we've not really considered and taken time to consider before. So that's really where the University of Derby have helped us massively and provided expertise that we simply don't have in-house.

You know, we're SMEs, we do our business day-to-day and manage our business day-to-day; we don't have a lot of time to go and look for funding pots — and there's so many out there it can be quite overwhelming. So to have someone like the contacts that we've got at the University of Derby, making us aware of these things, has helped us massively. So I'd say to any business that wasn't quite sure, you know just reach out and have a conversation. It costs nothing and it can really benefit the business going forward.

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