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Behind the Business with Jigsaw Business Group

Bdaily goes behind the business with Steve Spratt, Chief Executive Officer of Jigsaw Business Group, the Washington-based company which provides specialist consultancy and services to organisations to help improve their people, processes and profitability.

Can you give a short synopsis of your business?

Our services focus on the four following areas:

Jigsaw Business Improvement – Offers practical consultancy support at strategic, tactical and operational levels. We help our clients improve business practices and processes and develop their people, making the organisation more efficient and profitable.

Jigsaw Supply Chain – Provides practical professional, insightful affordable supply chain services. We can bring sustainable reduction in the total delivered cost of purchased materials and services.

Jigsaw People – Delivers recruitment, search, assessment and selection services. We support our clients by helping them find exactly the right candidate to fill their permanent, contract or interim vacancies at critical times.

Jigsaw Training & Development – Designing and delivering bespoke training programs. We help client organisations to improve skills, uncover hidden talent and aid retention.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

The Jigsaw Business Group is all about delivering “solutions that fit”. Meeting challenges head on, truly understanding cause, effect and risk and developing smart and sustainable solutions is what we are about. For the Jigsaw Business Group itself I think our biggest challenge has been managing and servicing the growth of our company.

We have delivered a large number of successful projects for clients and this tends to lead to repeat or referred business, which can be located anywhere in the world and can come from new market sectors. A good challenge to have, but with each new market comes fresh challenges that need new “solutions that fit”.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

There are many things that the Jigsaw Business Group team have achieved over the past 12 months. While we have been successfully growing our business, we have been reinvesting for the future by developing our operating processes and procedures which has led to achieving ISO 9001 certification for the Group.

We have purchased and moved to our own office premises in Washington, Tyne & Wear which gives us the space for our immediate growth plans. We have recently won National recognition at the EEF’s (Engineering Employers Federation) Future Manufacturing Awards as winners of the industry “Smart Product” award for a project we delivered with a client during 2015.

However, I would have to say the biggest achievement of the team over the past 12 months is the professional way we have collaborated with all our businesses’ stakeholders and the positive feedback we have received from our clients and suppliers.

What is your most important focus for the coming year, and what do you hope to achieve?

We believe in the need to continuously improve and to find ways to continually innovate and offer added value for our clients and stakeholders, so we will keep looking critically at the way we operate and the services we provide. However, as we recognise we are not experts in every field of business and are a very collaboratively minded organisation, we will focus on looking for business partners whom we can work together with to strengthen our service offering.

What excites you most about your industry and business?

The continued need for improvement, innovation and the ever increasing pace of change is very exciting, presents new challenges and means new solutions need to be found.

Add this to the absolute diversity of the businesses we support, from developing global quality operating systems for a high value branded jewellery manufacturer to supporting various suppliers of the offshore wind turbine industry in their journey to lean manufacturing, and you start to get a feel of how exciting each day can be.

What do you wish you’d known when starting out?

As our leadership team have all come from senior positions within industry, I believe we were fortunate that we were able and equipped to set up and start our business with strong fundamental business practices which have supported our rapid growth. I guess if we had been able to predict just how rapid our growth was going to be, we may have brought in key resources to add to our team earlier than we have, including our apprentices.

What will be the “next big thing“ in your industry, and how do you plan to handle it?

As mentioned previously, we see a continued acceleration in the speed of change and the need for continuous improvement and innovation, which is common across most, if not all, industries.

We also see a trend towards disruptive or “step change” innovationbecoming the norm over and above “step by step” change improvement, which can lead to more complex and significant changes in the way a business runs. Jigsaw believes that businesses will need to think much harder about how disruptive innovation will affect not only its core processes but also how an organisations people and the supply chain will be affected.

We believe Jigsaw’s training and development, supply chain management and people divisions will be of great value to clients who engage Jigsaw to support them with the challenges of change and are looking for ‘solutions that fits’.

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