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GARETH WARD visits Fuji Electronic Imaging which has breathed new life into the old Crosfield headquarters and vows never to be a second division company.
Ghosts stalk the corridors of what used to be the headquarters building of Crosfield Electronics. There's still some Crosfield signage and the plaque declaring that the building was opened by the Rt Hon Norman Tebbit is still on display, but the inside of the building seems to have been eviscerated.
This is not surprising. Crosfield is long gone, and today the building, staff and technology belongs to FujiFilm Electronic Imaging, formed in March last year to take on a business that had been split between Fuji and DuPont.
The large white clad building has no part in what FFEI managing director Mike Bartlett explains is a company with a positive future. Instead, at the beginning of next year, the few staff left in the main building will move nearby into the black 90,000sq ft unit. The front of this building will be reshaped to provide demonstration and training areas, created with the attention to detail that has seen Fuji breathe new life into what had become a thoroughly demoralised company.
FFEI is still however the largest prepress development facility in the UK. Mr Bartlett took the helm in the UK in January, moving from a pro-audio business where the industry has largely undergone the same transformation to digital with which the printing industry is currently grappling.
He says: "Integration, consolidation, rapid change in technology to digital have already happened with the result that the pro-audio industry is way ahead in terms of sophisticated electronic and software solutions."
The first task for Fuji was to stabilise what it controlled and to instill quality into the products and improvements to the company's infrastructure. He points to the success of the C-550 or Lanovia scanner as the first of a new generation of products to emerge from the reborn operation. Many others will follow, he indicates.
But the first task has been to refocus the company, Andy Cook, the director of commercial and customer operations, calls it "customer orientation". Mr Cook, a Crosfield...