Stories

Evidence from the studio and the shop floor

Quotes from recent participants sit beside longer accounts of capstone work and employer training blocks.

“The diploma’s plant-visit days forced me to measure queue times I had been guessing at for years. I still found the work-measurement module dense in weeks three and four, but the studio tutors stayed with the maths until it clicked.”

Helen Cartwright
Production supervisor, packaging manufacturer · Industrial Engineering Diploma

“We sent six team leaders on the Lean Operations week. The waste-walk exercise on the mock cell translated straight onto our night shift the following Monday—less theorising, more marked-up maps.”

Marcus Doyle
Operations manager, fabricated metals · Lean Operations Short Course

“The layout intensive caught a twist we had normalised at our packing station. My only wish is that we had booked the three-day block before we bought the new stillages.”

Priya Nair
Health and safety lead · Workplace Layout & Ergonomics Intensive

“Evening CPD suited my shift pattern. The warehouse visit was the session people still quote in meetings—concrete slotting trade-offs rather than slide decks.”

Tom Ellison
Graduate planner · Supply Chain & Logistics CPD

Extended accounts

Two projects from recent teaching

Capstone: rebalancing a bottle-fill cell in Sunderland

Diploma learner Jordan Avery spent Term 3 with a regional bottler whose fill line lost time between rinse and label. Time studies showed the rinse operator waiting on incomplete trays while the labeller ran short bursts.

Jordan’s proposed layout moved tray staging to the rinse operator’s left and introduced a simple two-bin signal for empty trays. After a supervised trial week, changeover chatter dropped and the cell held takt through the Friday peak. The company kept the board Jordan built in our studio as the reference for night-shift trainers.

Outcome: The site reported steadier fill rates across the late shift without adding headcount.

On-site training for a distribution centre near Gateshead

A three-day on-site block for twelve warehouse supervisors focused on slotting logic and walking paths that crossed at peak pick times.

Tutors used the centre’s own pick density data—printed, not projected—and walked aisles with each pair of supervisors. Day three ended with agreed aisle rules and a revised slotting list for the top forty SKUs. Two supervisors later enrolled on the Supply Chain CPD series to deepen inventory policy.

Outcome: Cross-aisle congestion at the 14:00 wave eased enough that the site delayed a planned agency hire.