The Innovation category winner at the Make Your Mark Awards says it’s determined to continue its automation journey.
Husqvarna’s Aycliffe site has brilliantly reinvented itself in recent years, shifting focus towards increasingly complex robotic lawnmowers.
In fact, one of those very mowers – branded with the Make Your Mark logo – was one of the main prizes in the night’s charity auction for Mark Preston’s defibrillator charity Missed A Beat.
Husqvarna Aycliffe’s maintenance and engineering manager Lee Francis, who received the Innovation trophy from Simon Robinson and Charlotte Kemp from Maverick Language, who were presenting it on behalf of category sponsor Cornerstone Group, said it was “testament to the teamwork that’s happened in the business – a collaboration of probably six or seven departments working together with a single goal, to develop an innovative product that’s automatable and technologically advanced.”
Without all those teams pulling together, he said, winning awards wouldn’t be possible, adding: “This is not an individual award, it’s definitely a team award.”
He added: “The mantra within the business now, our culture, is to follow those lessons learned – to understand the good practices we’ve implemented and roll them out over all new platforms going forward.
“The idea is that the lessons learned and all those key improvements we’ve made become natural, become inherent in the culture of the business, so that every product that comes on now has that same fighting chance to be highly automated, technologically advanced, safer to operate and safer to use.”
And he said the Aycliffe site’s success wouldn’t go unnoticed back at Husqvarna’s Swedish HQ.
He said: “This has been the start of the journey for us.
“We’re 65 per cent automatable but that’s not where we want to be – we want to be 100 per cent We want to push the technology and the products.
“The innovation we deliver in Newton Aycliffe inspires our teams in Sweden to go ‘actually, they’re very capable of delivering this – let’s push more their way, let’s push them to go to higher technologies, to innovate even more’. There’s loads more to come from us.”
Husqvarna pipped Excelpoint and TBOX Tech to the Innovation prize.
It was one of 11 awards presented at the event, which was organised by Resolution Media and Publishing on behalf of Aycliffe Business Park Community, and held in Hardwick Hall’s plush Coleman Suite.