Our Strategy
TR aims to focus its short-term growth in industries where we already have a presence, and in high‑growth and sustainable sectors for the medium and longer term. We retain our strategic customer base where it is profitable
Our strategic direction
Following the announcement of our Recover, Rebuild, Resilience transformation plan last year, the business is seeing positive change and demonstrating operational and financial resilience through strategy execution.
We continue to effectively navigate the current global challenges and economic conditions by focusing on our key objectives of margin management, focused growth, organisational effectiveness and operational efficiency, all of which are supporting improved returns despite the mixed demand backdrop.
RECOVER
In FY25, we successfully completed the Recover stage of our strategy, delivering measurable progress in profitability, margins, cash generation and return on capital employed
Having launched our new business strategy, we have made significant progress in all four strategic initiatives.
In FY25, our performance has benefitted largely from the driving of self-help initiatives. These have included negotiating improved value based pricing and/or walking away from low margin business, strengthening our total cost of ownership with our key strategic suppliers, driving logistics and operational efficiencies, particularly in the UK following the stabilisation of our warehouse consolidation into the NDC, and manufacturing utilisation efficiencies across all our manufacturing locations and through implementation of the organisation development work centred around our OneTR business model.
REBUILD
Our value proposition of supply chain simplification, manufacturing and engineering excellence will deliver value and profitable growth in our chosen markets of automotive, smart infrastructure and medical equipment.
We will continue to drive self-help benefits in FY26 through our four key strategic initiatives of margin management, focused growth, operational efficiency and organisation effectiveness with the expectation that the economic recovery will support mid-term top and bottom-line growth over the mid-term.
RESILIENCE
Our final stage is to ensure our business delivers sustainable double digit EBIT margins and ROCE by being a stronger, more capable and more agile business. As we move through the transformation and turnaround journey, we are building better business processes, leveraging best practices and enhancing our talent and bench strength to enable this
sustained performance
Our long-term goal is to be measured alongside the best in our industry meaning we need to demonstrate resilient and sustained level of high performance through the economic cycle.
We have made significant progress in FY25 in strengthening our leadership and bench including internal talent development, putting in place standard business processes across many aspects of our business which build on the investments made in technology like D365 and on the OneTR business model and culture. These foundational improvements will be built on and expanded every year to support this long-term goal.
Our Recover, Rebuild, Resilience strategy is delivered through four key initiatives:
Margin management:
Strategic focus
- Pricing increases with low‑margin customers/ products
-
Procurement savings
What we’ve achieved
- Gross margin has increased by c.300bps
- TruProfit 2.0 toolkit deployment
- New pricing and procurement policies rolled out
- Targeted commercial training delivered
- D365 data analytics providing outstanding insight
- Procurement organisation alignment completed
Our future focus
- Continued gross margin progression
- Smart costing tool for optimisation of manufacturing capability utilisation
- Value engineering workshops with customer key accounts
- CBAM and sustainable sourcing/supplier management
- Key account quarterly business review process embedded and rolled out
Focused growth:
Strategic focus
- Profitable expansion of share of wallet with existing growth customers
- Target customer acquisitions in chosen market sectors
What we’ve achieved
- Automation of new reporting framework which maps customer accounts to new strategy sectors and provides dashboards to monitor growth
- New customer wins
- Diversification of pipeline opportunities into smart infrastructure and medical equipment
- Centralised engineering organisation and innovation roadmap in place
- Additional engineering resource added in North America and Asia
Our future focus
- Build out engineering and commercial teams in Asia and NA
- Accelerate portfolio balance for new business wins
- Build and pilot virtual innovation centre bringing value proposition to life through customer engagement
- Globalise smart infrastructure key account relationships
- Develop and integrate pipeline tools and process including training
Organisational effectiveness:
Strategic focus
- Health and safety environment and performance change
- Engagement, performance management, talent management and OneTR culture change
- Technology enablement
- Financial controls standardisation and best practice
What we’ve achieved
- Embedded a stronger safety environment
- Enhanced communication and engagement
- Significant progress on our OneTR business model based on four geographical regions and supported by central enabling functions
- Simplified and streamlined operating model
- Delivered restructuring benefits of 10% non‑operating headcount as committed
- Office 365 technology and Cognos financial tool implemented globally
Our future focus
- Further organisation model work to strengthen and standardise structure, roles and responsibilities
- Optimisation of administration through shared services in technology, quality and finance
- HR processes (performance management, reward and recognition, culture engagement and inclusion, talent and capability)
- Technology enablement through D365 ERP implementation into remaining locations
Operational efficiency:
Strategic focus
- Supply chain optimisation
- Distribution and manufacturing efficiencies
What we’ve achieved
- £3m annualised cost savings from our NDC operational improvement programme
- Logistics and supply chain optimisation and manufacturing asset utilisation improvement in Europe
- Development of efficiency improvement roadmap for both distribution and manufacturing facilities including balanced scorecard of performance metrics
- Investment of c.£2m in new equipment to strengthen safety, quality and efficiency capability
Our future focus
- Driving efficiency gains using balanced scorecard metrics and lean project capabilities
- Asia manufacturing capability and utilisation improvement
- Sustainable technology solutions including solar projects
- Sustainable packaging solutions innovation
- TR Inventory Management (TRiM) solution development and roll out to appropriate customers
