Productive manufacturing tech: FourJaw secures grant funding

Dubbed as the ‘Fitbit for UK manufacturing’, tech spin-out from the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) - FourJaw - has secured grant funding to further advance its technology device for increasing manufacturing productivity. Those in the industrial industry that have adopted FourJaw’s technology have reported five-fold increases in productivity. 

“It’s great to see the region backing two very talented and enterprising engineers who have taken their experience at the AMRC to spin out a company that will help UK manufacturers – large and small – to capture and deploy the power of data and digitalisation to improve productivity,” Steve Foxley, CEO, AMRC.

Receiving its grant funding from the Business Productivity Programme, FourJaw will begin a £4.7mn collaborative venture alongside Barnsley and Sheffield councils, the Sheffield City Region Combined Mayoral Authority and the England European Regional Development Fund.

The programme forms part of Sheffield’s wider approach to create an ecosystem that fosters individual and economic innovation to increase productivity. 

“What we are looking at here is a potential game changer for UK manufacturing and the Business Productivity Programme grant is just the financial catalyst we need to make a swift transition from a rather labour intensive installation to a quick-to-deploy device that will give production managers deep insights that enable huge gains in output and productivity,” said Chris Iveson, Co-Founder and CEO at FourJaw.

“In Yorkshire there is a saying that if it ain’t cutting metal, it ain’t making money. In the high-value manufacturing sector, which is key to the northern economy, the average utilisation of a machine is typically less than 30 per cent. Just a 10 per cent increase in productivity would be revolutionary; but our device delves deep into the brains of shop floor machines, decoding data to drive productivity gains well in excess of this,” added Robin Hartley, Co-Founder and CTO.

Who are FourJaw?

Founded in 2020, by Iveson and Hartley the two were research engineers at the AMRC - part of the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult. The two developed the idea of an affordable device that harnesses production data to empower technically excellent manufacturers with world-class productivity levels.

Whilst their technology is yielding strong results, both Iveson and Hartley are on a mission to make installing their output-boosting technology even simpler for manufacturers to deploy.

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