A global tour of 2022: Tigers, Eyes, Scooters, Chilis and Birmingham – what a year!
As we cast our eyes back over what has been a very eventful year, our minds turn to the Chinese calendar and the move from 22 to 23 sees us leave the year of the tiger and begin the year of the rabbit.
Our team love any excuse for a bit of a song and we have a thing about eyes, so “The Eye of The Tiger” seems quite fitting for this feature. The rabbit may signify a bit of love for our local area as we are so lucky to be in the most amazing part of Yorkshire. Sheep (that is 2027 by the way!) and rabbits are a plenty however, tigers are bit more rare unless you take to South Yorkshire and visit Yorkshire Wildlife Park!
Back at Global HQ 2022 started with time spent focusing on what really mattered to us as manufacturers. They say that everyday is a school day and we have an appetite for continued learning, even about our own business. With that in mind, we took time at the start of the year to look again at our core values and just how much we value the relationship we have with our clients. We felt it was important to focus this year on mapping that out in even more detail and exploring the journey we have with clients and how they feel.
As February rolled around we began talking more about the range of products we have been involved in and we featured the Hydracup as one example of revolutionary manufacturing. A key part of 2022 for us was highlighting the incredible entrepreneurs and OEM’s that engage with our services. This also led us nicely into the onset of Spring and what better way to capture that by amazing photos of our local area taken by our team.
We shared news of our area, events that were happening and launched “in the eyes of our team.” Being visual is so important and enables us to showcase our location, heritage, team as well as the incredible range of products we are involved in. Another key aspect to our content for 2022 was focusing on being visionary. If we are to deliver on our value of “experience,” that being not only our own years of hard graft but also the experience of our clients then it was important to capture “vision” in the context of us being able to understand our clients end goals. We talked about agility and supply chain. When it comes to delivering on promises we know that timing is everything and so many things can happen when multiple companies are involved in one product.
Each member of our team is dedicated to a quick response to clients and having that agility within our business means we can respond and react. Well, here is a bit of a side note but how fascinating that if we are talking agility and tigers, did you know there is a crystal called “Tigers Eye” and it signifies motivation and pushing you to move past any boundaries you set for yourself. It stimulates you to tackle the unknown in life, even if it gets uncomfortable. If nerves creep in, then the Tiger’s Eye meaning and uses will remind you of your inner strength and capability. We certainly think that offers a really positive influence on life!
Back to all things manufacturing and our reflection on the last 12 months – location is important to us, and we joined in with the fantastic news that Bradford was awarded City of Culture. More reasons to enjoy all things West Yorkshire! More of our content talked about transparency, collaboration and partnerships. To help describe more about our values and vision we introduced “iwords” This formed part of the tone we were keen to take as our focus to highlight the character of our business and team.
Events kicked off in style in April when we were back on the road and involved with Backing Britain, a series of events organised by the Made in Group. We attended Derby and Leeds and really enjoyed having great conversations with manufacturers, entrepreneurs and hearing pioneering stories for a range of businesses celebrating their achievements/inventions.
Around this time, we also loved sharing news of the events happening on the railway right next to our factory. The Keighley and Worth Valley Railway (KWVR) is a 'unique 5-mile branch line railway set in the heart of West Yorkshire and running heritage steam and diesel trains through stunning Brontë Country. We get to look out and see all the action happening right before our eyes!
Conversations began to appear more in our content and mainly because great manufacturing happens following detailed conversations with clients. We also shared some fab videos of our team where they talked about their experiences, and we got to hear a few more rather interesting and less known facts about their interests outside of work. Andy our MD also produced a personal insight into how he started the company and why family mattered so much.
June saw us land in Birmingham for the Manufacturing and Engineering Expo – this was an outstanding event with 1000’s of visitors and exhibitors. We ran a competition on our stand and invited people to do the “huzzle” – no, not a dance move although we were tempted to give that a try – this was an engineering puzzle, and one lucky winner would win a luxury Yorkshire Hamper of goodies!
The summer was great for us with new people joining the team, we celebrated 10 years of being in business and focused on Amy Johnson as our feature in Women in Engineering Day. We enjoyed getting really involved with Made In Yorkshire and shared loads of fab stuff to our microsite with them. We are super proud of our location and the fact that products made in Yorkshire are seen around the world and impacting/benefitting the lives of others. We were over the moon to be recognised by Made In Yorkshire for all our contributions to their site and involvement with their events.
The year continued with more focus on key products we have been involved in and we highlighted more members of the team and their thoughts on working for us here at GP! Healthcare continues to be a massive part of the work we get involved with alongside automotive, so we wanted to share more on the projects we have worked on.
Then as we left the summer and headed for the chillier part of the year, we introduced two more creative ideas “global social eye” and “global reasons” The social eye is a top-secret agent who is everywhere, and no one knows his or hers true identity! We enjoyed sharing features by the social eye who was hiding away keeping an eye on people and places. Global reasons was a chance for us to just start giving one reason at a time (there are hundreds by the way) why we simply love manufacturing in Yorkshire.
All our communications were centered around such important things to us, people, places, projects, total precision and performance. Its so good to look back and forward – looking back we talked about the best inventions of all time and in terms of looking ahead, we were delighted to attend an event at Huddersfield University. A fantastic centre of learning and producing the next generation of engineers, designers, manufacturers and innovators.
November came around and we sent one of our team to Dusseldorf where he attended Medica – a leading international trade fair for the medical sector. This was just so amazing that you would need to leap over to our other blog to read all about it – this is where you will find the scooter!
More news was shared about upcoming exciting projects with a large majority in the healthcare sector so on that one “mums the word”!
With updates about heartwarming festive events happening in and around Haworth it just reinforces what a stunning place we operate from surrounded by wonderful people, heritage and countryside. It’s a real pleasure to be here and look back on such a great 12 months.
The future looks exciting, and we can’t wait to share more with you in 2023 so keep those eyes peeled!