The UK Technology Landscape, Transformation and Disruption

Head of Information & Technology, Christopher Jones at SMS – Smart Made Simple discusses the Technological Landscape within the UK, Transformation and Disruption.

Christopher Jones (CJ) has been in the test arena of the electronics manufacturing industry for more than 40 years. Through this time, he has witnessed a dramatic change in technology, bringing SMS – Smart Made Simple up the learning curve to ensure that their capability roadmap is aligned to the speed of innovation.

CJ assesses the market needs throughout the entire production lifecycle and beyond, to provide a completely transparent and traceable supply chain service.

In today’s complex business environment, SMS – Smart Made Simple have intensified their efforts and increased their focus on innovation. Non-traditional EMS sectors, such as industrial and medical electronics, continue to be stronger industry growth drivers, aided by clean technology spending. Examining the production lifecycle to understand where else SMS – Smart Made Simple adds-value and ‘stickiness’, has led to several strategic partnerships being formed, to ensure a complete end-to-end service, offering vertical integration capabilities.

With the convergence of technologies and the broadening of applications, CJ ensures that SMS – Smart Made Simple serve the industry’s requirements, as well as identifying technology trends and inflections. Whether a start-up or an established household brand, if SMS – Smart Made Simple customers’ have a design, engineering, manufacturing or supply chain problem, CJ is driving the technology requirements within SMS – Smart Made Simple to provide a tailored solution.

CJ’s Smart View – The Design & Development Landscape and How it has Changed

“In the UK, there is more of a move to attracting start-ups with a conceptual idea, and at the end of the day, people don’t know, what they don’t know.  That’s where companies like SMS – Smart Made Simple step in, in a consultative way.

Contrary to negative belief, we are still an innovative race in the UK, don’t let newspaper headlines fool you into thinking we are not.  We are a nation of inventors, but we seem to have restricted ourselves, we seem to see a hurdle from concept to creation, and again, this is where companies like SMS – Smart Made Simple come in.  We adopt that concept, and we grow it through the power of our Development Centre, Design and Engineering how to move through to consumption and beyond into the circular economy.

The large Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have exited the UK en masse.  With them, they took their in-house design capabilities.  This left a gap in the UK competence roadmap.  Again, this is where we (SMS – Smart Made Simple) identified a route to market to help us to differentiate ourselves by becoming strategically involved in Development, making significant investments in the equipment that is required to be taken seriously as Design and Development Engineers.