Our Story

4IR.UK specialises in creating Monitoring, Control and Automation solutions, often based on the MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform, for manufacturing environments. We also provide consultancy and development for other Industry 4.0 platforms.

Under an former entity the business unit was formed in 2014 by Engineers who had previously integrated Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) into automotive electronics assembly production lines (SMT).

In 2016 Co-Founders David Graham and Julian Singh formed a partnership with Creative England which helped to catapult the task of market discovery and prototype development with key industry players.

The seed funding secured by the partnership gave the business an defined runway of a year and once this came to an end at the end of 2017, so did the partnership. Julian also took this opportunity to depart the business.

In 2018 4IR.UK was born and this venture is once again an wholly own subsidiary of Internet of Things focused, British Systems. Our funding is currently bootstrapped by our parent and we are always looking for funding and development partners.

We are based in the digital technology cluster of the Bournemouth and Poole conurbation within the county of Dorset. The cluster has been named the fastest-growing digital economy ahead of London and features two Universities with a growing number of digital agencies and Fintech businesses.

The county of Dorset also hosts a number of SMT machine builders including DEK, Speedprint and Reprint.

Our Approach

Our approach builds upon the success of great leaders both old and new.

Digital Native

We serve the hardware industry but our advantage is we're a pure software company able to employ the lessons learnt by the software industry of the last 20 years. These include:

• Large development cycles have been replaced by leaner rapid releases. This allows progress to be visible and customer feedback collected frequently resulting in minimal rework.
• Ship It! Developers understand that every software iteration, while not bug free, should be a product in itself. This allows both project management and our customers to 'pivot' the project or even cancel it but always come away with product functionality.
• Time consuming manual processes are out. Mandrolic human testing has been replaced by building the test processes into the heart of the product using Test Driven Development (TDD) techniques. Also manual Integration Testing have been replaced by allowing the QA Engineers to automate the tests via scripting.

The important thing to remember with a digital native company is success can be guaranteed the more a customer interacts with the development process. So as a digital native company ourselves we will proactively take you along our journey using all our web outlets.

Collaboration

We are always looking for collaborating with external expert resources and solution providers in order to produce the most efficient solutions.

Being the Customer

Henry Ford said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" yet some businesses still rely on Voice of Customer (VoC) to guide their product roadmap. We believe this results in late delivery of solutions which are often also not fit for purpose. Instead we use our customers to validate our beliefs.

To be ahead of customer's requests and make sure solutions are ready on-the-shelf we firstly must be a customer ourselves. To do this we must use the products we build, or as Microsoft would put it "Eat your own dogfood". But before a product has even been developed, the functionality of the products we create have often come from our own issues with the status quo. We ask our team to develop solutions that resolve these issues becasue we know our customers will have them also. The start-up community calls this approach "scratching your own itch".

Continual Innovation

Innovation plays a major role in the way we design our customer experience, corporate strategy, product efficiency, and system intelligence.

Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS)

Industry 4.0 is batch size 1 so the goal is to be mass customisable and automated. Keeping our solutions modular and simple means that they are as applicable to a small customer as they are to a giant multinational. Employing Web-based technology is key because by nature these technologies are already modular as they are constructed on top of frameworks and platforms.

Our Values

Our values are important to us.

Engineering Excellence

We take great pride in our hard working team. Our highly qualified engineers are the brains of our operation, we make sure they stand front and center, literally, giving demos and fielding questions. Our support team is the fuel that keeps our engine running smoothly.

Be Human

We allow our personality and culture to show through to our products. Companies such as Numatic International demonstrate that to apply personality onto a product is a key marketing tool and also maintains the business's culture. In Beaminster, Dorset during 1981, Numatic gave birth to Henry who is famously known for the vacuum cleaner with a smile :)

True Ownership

We encourage our people to have ownership of their products to prevent Engineers who are "Jack of all trades, Master of none". The team's success is the product’s success.

We achieve this by breaking our products down into discipline areas and mirroring our Engineer's interests to these. Often this promotes the use of different technologies and creates a tiered architecture, also known as a stack, of both software and people. Discipline areas include:

• User Experience (UX) – inc. Marketing
• Data & Intelligence
• Platform & Tools – inc. Documentation
• Quality Assurance (QA)
• Vision - Remote Monitoring
• Security
• Motion Control - When we interface with our customer’s products