Jim has worked in the nuclear industry for the last 30 years, primarily in commercial and manufacturing support roles. He is currently the Team Manager for the Operational Research team in Nexia Solutions.
In his early career Jim worked as a reactor physicist for BNFL at the Chapelcross site. Here he played a key role in the re-commissioning of Reactor 3 to enable the production of tritium for the MOD from the irradiation of isotope cartridges. His work focused primarily on safety case development and the execution of a number of commissioning experiments for the first magnox reactor to be loaded with enriched fuel.
Jim moved on in early 1980 to work in what was then the Fuel Division of BNFL. As the Applied Mathematics and Operational Research Manager, he led a small team of technologists. This was a site-wide problem solving role in support of senior management. It entailed the modelling of various chemical, physical and operational processes, plus the development and implementation of a business systems strategy for the site.
This led naturally to Jim becoming the Manufacturing Resource Planning Project Manager for the Springfields site in 1987. Fuel Division had moved from a cost-plus to fixed trading environment and Jim led a project team drawn from across the business. This team implemented a programme of fundamental changes to the way the Springfields site was run, with the introduction of a rigorous manufacturing planning environment that focused on customer service. The site was subsequently awarded the UK–recognised ‘MRPII Class A’ status as a result.
Jim also led a ‘Just in Time’ programme through which the lead times for the manufacture of all Springfields products were slashed. This resulted in inventory savings of the order of £200M with consequent quality improvements. The overall impact of both these programmes were savings of the order of £10M per annum for a business with a then turnover of £200M. Similar uranium financing savings were also made for the Springfields customer base.
This experience gained in business process improvement and manufacturing systems implementation led on to a role within the BNFL UK Group (primarily Sellafield-focused) where there was a drive to similarly improve business processes and introduce change. In his role as Information Strategy co-ordinator, Jim was part of a project team that identified and implemented new finance and procurement business processes across BNFL.
Jim’s next role was as Business Process and Systems Manager for the Sellafield Mox Plant, a role he took up early in the commissioning of this key plant. In this role, his principal contribution was the implementation of rigorous Sales and Operations Planning processes that put the focus on developing realistic views of the likely future manufacturing capacity against which sales could be defined.
In 2000 Jim moved to Research and Technology (the pre-cursor to Nexia Solutions) to take up the role of Strategic and Operational Analysis Team Manager and focused on the introduction of a realistic analysis approach to the assessment and improvement of plant capacity across the principal Sellafield site plants. In this role he has built up a team of highly analytical individuals who have applied their skills to address operational performance issues on both the Sellafield Site and Reactor Sites leading to significant savings for customers. This is Jim’s current role.
