Built in Yorkshire, built to last: Lewis Davis
We didn’t set out to become one of Yorkshire’s manufacturing survivors. In fact, we didn’t even start in Yorkshire. But somewhere between a small shop on London’s Harrow Road and a century spent rebuilding ourselves in Rotherham, we learned the one lesson that’s kept us standing while others disappeared: Yorkshire doesn’t reward flash. It rewards grit, reinvention and doing the job so well, it becomes more than second nature.
This year, we’re celebrating 100 years. We’re still independent, still based in Rotherham and still growing. In an industry that has swallowed up or wiped out most of its smaller players, that alone makes us something of an outlier. People assume the secret is some unbroken family formula or making a good weighing scale. It’s neither. The real answer is based on the fact we’ve continuously adapted, which is precisely why we’re still trading a century on while so many of our contemporaries aren’t. Surviving was never one dramatic save. It’s been a hundred years of small, sometimes unglamorous decisions: recessions weathered, globalisation absorbed, Brexit navigated,and, most recently, a pandemic that forced us to reconfigure how we operate almost overnight. What’s stayed constant is simple – manufacturers, and the people who rely on them, need equipment they can trust without thinking twice about it.
For most of our history, it’s meant being brilliant at one thing. Manufacturing precision-engineered weighing scales that are built to NHS standards; one of the sectors we supply and have had the pleasure of doing so for more than 40 years. However, the biggest lesson of the last decade hasn’t been about the scales. It’s been about what happens to the data they produce.
The humble weighing scale used to be a reactive purchase; something nobody really thought about until it stopped working. That mindset is out of date. Weighing systems are increasingly being recognised as operational intelligence tools, seamlessly connecting with ERP systems and giving sector-wide businesses the audit trail regulators increasingly demand. Our response? We’re investing in AI-driven predictive servicing, so customers spot a fault before it becomes costly downtime.
If I had to name the single biggest shift coming for Yorkshire manufacturers over the next five to ten years, though, it wouldn’t be AI. It would be data centralisation and, more specifically, how businesses handle waste.
From October this year, Defra’s Digital Waste Tracking reforms mean permitted sites can no longer rely on paper waste transfer notes. Every movement, waste stream and carrier must be recorded digitally. Handled properly, it’s a genuine advantage: real-time visibility across sites, fewer spreadsheets, better recycling rates and decisions based on actual data rather than guesswork.
That’s the real story of the next chapter for manufacturers here. Businesses that treat data as background noise will constantly play catch-up. Those that centralise it, trust it and act on it will be the ones still standing.
We could have been swallowed up by a larger competitor a dozen times over. We weren’t, because we kept listening to customers and kept changing what ‘doing one thing well’ actually looked like. That’s the only formula for the next hundred years that I trust.
Lewis Davis is Managing Director of Rotherham based Marsden Precision Weighing Solutions