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| PLANT ENERGY SYSTEMS EDITORIAL FOR CHAMBERLINK AD Take one company wishing to expand its IT know-how. Add one university graduate keen to showcase his skills. Blend in a busy workplace and leave to mature for up to three months. Top up with academic mentoring at regular intervals. As a recipe for success the Knowledge Innovation Technology Transfer Scheme, (KITTS) is a winner in more ways than one. The system which places graduates into small and medium-sized West Midland companies has proved an ideal way to give young people essential experience “on the job” while simultaneously delivering cutting-edge thinking to local firms. Halesowen-based Plant Energy Systems creates heating and plumbing systems for large organisations, putting together the kind of machinery that managing director Steve Cooper describes as the “heart of a building”. Its customers include some of the UK’s major construction firms plus hospitals, universities, Ministry of Defence estates and other big institutions. The company took up its second KITTS scheme in partnership with the University of Wolverhampton last year after MD Steve Cooper decided to update from two- to three-dimensional computer aided design to make the business more competitive. Wolverhampton IT graduate Ranjit Gill was employed to create a vast 3D virtual “library” of commonly-used plumbing and heating components. As a result the partnership has scooped the best KITTS student placement prize in the West Midlands regional Lord Stafford Awards which recognise innovative links between industry and higher education. Award-winner Ranjit Gill has now joined the 30-strong workforce of Plant Energy Systems as a full-time employee and the company is keen to nurture similar collaborations in future. Plant Energy assembles entire boiler-house and chiller systems, including the machinery which pumps hot and cold water and channels electricity throughout a building. But instead of carrying this out on a construction site - where numerous trades will be competing with one another, often in bad weather - it does it in a clean factory environment and then moves the finished product to the designated site in one piece. “If you were going to buy a new BMW you wouldn’t want one that’s been built in a field,,” says Mr Cooper. “It’s the same with the heating system in a modern building. There are lots of benefits of doing it our way, not just in quality terms but in health and safety. There are a couple of hundred deaths a year on construction sites where people are lifting heavy materials and this is one way of solving that. You make one delivery instead of perhaps 40 or 50. The company had been reliant on 2D modelling. As Mr Cooper explains: “This means that you can only see a flat image and there can be a problem with clashes. If you imagine a plant room with pipes and wires going everywhere you can’t see where pipes might hit one another. We wanted to move into 3D modelling but all the existing models were American and we needed to cater for the British system.” Ranjit’s brief was to build a comprehensive library of the parts the company uses, the pipe fittings, valves, pumps and so on. “He has has taken some proprietory software from the US and used it as a platform for building the models from scratch. It was a mammoth task. He’s modelled them to actual size so we can reduce them down, put them into the 3D model and them email the model directly to a client. “They can rotate it, walk through it and annotate it. The big advantage for us is that once they are ready we can automatically print the working drawing from the model and, more importantly, the individual fabrication which cuts out an enormous amount of work and preparation.” This is the second time Plant Energy has collaborated with the university in this way. Mr Cooper originally attended a KITTS seminar after reading a leaflet about the scheme and was quickly convinced of its all-round benefits. “For small companies trying to introduce new technological systems it is brilliant because you get the back-up from the university, you get a bright graduate coming to work for you and it is subsidised so you only pay half the costs. The university helped us to fill in all the forms and managed the placement entirely. “It’s a win, win situation,” he adds. “The graduates gain valuable social skills. Sometimes academically they might be very good but they might not be used to getting on with people in a working environment. That’s what this is all about.” Ranjit concurs. “I heard about KITTS during one of my lectures,” he says. “I sent my CV to Plant Systems and was accepted.” For someone who had previously only undertaken short-term work experience, being thrown in at the deep end into a real industrial environment in his first paid job was the best way to demonstrate his expertise in parametric modelling. “It can be hard to get experience when you come out of university,” he says. “Some employers don’t want to hire you without experience but you can’t get the experience without being hired. This way, I just got on with the job. Everyone was very supportive and the university sent me assessment questionnaires which gave them feedback on my progress.” His 12-week placement was immediately extended to a three to four-month contract followed by a full-time job offer, which he was pleased to accept. Several months on, Mr Cooper is more than satisfied with the project’s outcome. “It has moved the company workload to the front end,” he says. “It’s more office focused now to reduce the work on the shopfloor. For the future it means we’ll be able to get far more work done with the same amount of people. It’s not about getting rid of people and cost cutting in that way but about redeploying people and retraining them. One of the guys has already come off the shopfloor to work on the 3D model.” Meanwhile, the company’s enhanced capabilities have raised its profile while saving money. www.plantenergy.co.uk Jenni Ameghino. |
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