Slater Harrison

Source: Manufacturing Digital

Date :23/10/2007 14:58:04

Laminating and paper coating firm Slater Harrison has turned working in a specialised niche market to its advantage thanks to a strong, flexible workforce and continued product development.

Written by Sam Wright & Produced by Rahim Ali

Formed way back in 1929, much has changed for Slater Harrison since its inception. Starting out as a manufacturer of ‘paste boards’ for hand painted window bills, the company now sells to 70 countries world-wide, from Australia and Brunei to Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe. Alongside its traditional techniques and products (converting paper to cardboard and laminating), the company has grown and diversified into many areas, including ink-jet, self-adhesive and synthetic coating.

Despite these changes, and unlike many companies, Slater Harrison has maintained a coherent identity throughout its 75 years. For example, the display board market is still considered an important part of its portfolio and the company remain based at the same site at Lowerhouse Mills, Cheshire.

Job satisfaction

One way Slater Harrison - which counts Day Glo among its brands - has managed to achieve this is through the loyalty of its workers. The company has put this down to excellent job satisfaction and an adherence to its mission statement; “to achieve excellence through a loyal and competent staff force.”

A major part of this is flexibility. New trade is difficult to come across, so when you win it, you want it to stay. And of course this is only feasible if there is a certain flexibility in the workforce. Customers could be told the lead-time and then dictate the working hours to the employees. This just isn’t the case now. Lead-times are now so competitive that orders rest on them. Not only that, but employees expect much more flexibility as well, and Slater Harrison has responded to this shift.

Forward thinking

The company also aims to keep ahead of the market. In a typically proactive step, Slater Harrison formed a strategic alliance with competitors Tullis Russell, the papermaking and coating firm in 1999. Together, they worked to investigate coatings of synthetics rather than paper, an arrangement that both companies have considered a success. The contract for this deal recently expired, but Tullis Russell still counts Slater Harrison as one of its main suppliers.

Early last year, Slater Harrison obtained the self adhesive tape company Webmaster Ltd, which, together with the 2003 acquisition of Cavalier Tapes and Conversions, allowed the firm to completely integrate all production facilities at its main headquarters in Bollington.

This has led to Slater Harrison offering a new comprehensive service to greetings card publishers with self adhesive requirements, and a step closer to offering the kind of ‘one-stop’ package that seems to be essential in any niche production sector.

This approach, together with a strict continuous improvement strategy - which since its implementation in 1994 saw 30 percent growth in a decade, including six record years - has allowed the company to be more resistant to the peaks and troughs of the market.

Innovations

This year, the company unveiled Centura Pearl, an innovative new product which unlike traditional metallic paper and card contains no actual metallic pigments. This means it does not tarnish or fingerprint, making it ideal for many purposes, such as envelope manufacture, greetings cards, gift-wrap, designer packaging and the increasingly popular hobbycraft hand made card market. The specialist coating can also be applied on one or both sides to any weight of paper or card (and many others surfaces) as long as it can be supplied in a roll.

Slater Harrison currently stocks this in 25 colours, including silver and gold, and considers the products to be one of its most successful. The company also recently introduced its new ‘Designer Collection’ of embossed paper and card to sit alongside the Educraft range, which is sold predominately in the education market, and the mainstays Colourmount and Inglevale.

Colourmount is sold predominately into the picture framing market, while Inglevale is primarily used by the screen printing industry. As ever, the main strength of Slater Harrison is its flexibility. Customers’ own colours can be matched, coated or laminated then converted to sheets, rolls, or jumbo reels.

Despite these developments, the company admit the past two-years have been difficult largely due to consolidation - but this struggle has also been felt throughout the industry. Paper and board consumption has been falling considerably over the past few years. In 2006, just 12.5 million tonnes was used in the UK, which coupled with rising production costs has led to widespread gloom throughout the sector. But Slater Harrison, with its new acquisitions fully assimilated, is now starting to see a considerable upturn in trade.

‘Market pressures’

Indeed, energy remains the biggest challenge facing the UK paper industry, and this seems unlikely to change in the near future. While the increasing cost of producing and coating paper is hanging over businesses such as Slater Harrison, it seems that future legislation will call for reductions in energy consumption, carbon emissions and call for use of energy derived from renewable resources. The situation has been difficult enough for the Confederation of Paper Industry’s Kathy Bradley to state that there is a ‘severe strain on the whole industry.’ The energy issue might well be a hurdle that faces every paper and laminating company in the UK, but as long as Slater Harrison keeps their focus on innovation and product development, they will continue to buck the trend.