Another successful year draws to a close @ Airedale
As we come towards the end of another hectic year across the whole Airedale Group, it is a good time to reflect on the past year as well as hint at some of the very exciting news and developments we have for the second decade of this Millennium, which itself it quite hard to believe. Time flies even faster when you work here!
One of our many strengths lies in the fact that we are not wholly reliant on one or two business sectors but have built up extensive experience in several. So whilst it has been widely reported that the Casual Dining sector has continued to face challenging times this year, we have delivered more Education projects in 2019 than ever before across the British mainland. We are a true nationwide (and increasingly European wide ) company and we have completed several Education projects in Scotland and Wales as well as around England. Likewise, we have also completed more projects in pub retail and care homes, whilst there are many more staff benefiting from brand new catering facilities we will have designed and installed, including beautiful interior design.
Industry-wide through our excellent trade associations CEDA and CESA, we have heard of the uncertainty surrounding Brexit as leading to decisions on larger projects being delayed. In the light of last week’s decisive General Election result, it would appear that Britain will be at least withdrawing from the EU at the end of January. However, uncertainty remains about our future trading relationship with the EU so there is a collective, multi-sector clamour to the newly elected Government to remove this uncertainty please. However, our attitude at Airedale is to focus on delivering commercial catering projects to the highest standard possible and respond promptly to whatever challenges either the Government or markets we operate in throw at us.
Another key focus throughout 2019 has been our in-house manufacturing solutions. We play an active role across social media and on LinkedIn and in particular Twitter to promote UK Manufacturing across all sectors (#ukmfg #GBmfg) and through connections made on both, we have had highly constructive meetings with the Department for International Trade. We would like to place on record our thanks to both the Jefferson Group and ABI Electronics for their invaluable assistance here. We are proud to be a British manufacturer in our own right and through our expanding projects divisions, more businesses are benefiting from our ability to design, manufacture, install and ultimately service and maintain their commercial catering facilities in-house.
Design is at the heart of everything we do here at Airedale and we have made huge strides with reference to BIM, in particular since we employed our BIM Manager and BIM Co-ordinator. As we look into 2020, we believe BIM will play an even more important role especially in the public sector. Read our latest BIM blog here.
In the meantime our multi-award winning service and division Airedale Technical Care (SCCUK) continues to expand, benefiting from ambitious initiatives to become even more efficient. Headcount for our directly employed Service and Installation Engineers is now over 100. You are increasingly likely to see one of our Service or Installation vans.
On behalf of us all at Airedale, we wish everyone a very happy Christmas and we look forward to further enhancing and expanding our core services in 2020.
