SEA success at cohort excellence awards SEA success at cohort excellence awards

SEA Success at Cohort Excellence Awards

We are delighted to announce that in this year’s Cohort business excellence awards, SEA received eleven awards. The awards recognise and reward employees and team’s business excellence across the Cohort group.

Business excellence means working in a way that leads to an excellent outcome for the business such as:

  • Achieving success in challenging circumstances
  • Going significantly beyond what is expected
  • Performing your role more effectively by doing it in a new way
  • Creating new products to meet customers’ needs
  • Increasing business effectiveness and efficiencies through innovation
  • Finding a way to achieve more output for less cost
  • Winning or delivering important new business

The awards won by SEA were:

Silver Award: Frigate Sustainment Phase 1 Bid support Team. Securing this contract is a major element of SEA’s strategy and has involved taking our highly successful submarine communications offering and expanding it to include both surface vessels and export customers. The core team spent many years undertaking negotiations which, along with the time-zone difference, called for late nights and early mornings to ensure we could maximise the time with the customer to get to know them and their challenges.

Silver Award: SEA CSC & South American TLS Teams. The team worked tirelessly to push the CSC contract over the line after nearly a decade of negotiations. During this time, the team created and managed a joint venture partnership in Canada. Winning the CSC contract has secured a busy future for SEA and JSK. Secondly, the team involved in winning the South American TLS contract showed great tenacity and teamwork whilst technical responses were made, T&Cs were negotiated in-country. For both contracts, due to time differences and response deadlines, it was often necessary to work extended hours and at weekends for prolonged periods. The teams showed great resilience and excellent teamwork, often outside of normal working hours.

Bronze Award: cECS Training team for delivering a ground-breaking blended training system to the Royal Navy customer, including a novel system emulation that accurately reflects the real system behaviour. The blended training solution that has resulted from this piece of work was specifically named by the RN customer as one of the most useful and innovative training solutions delivered to date.

Bronze Award: Chris for working significantly above and beyond his remit and work area, for being results-driven, and helping us maintain our positive order-intake progress. Chris also took significant personal initiative, which aligns closely with our independent thinking value. Despite a 40% increase in activity, Chris maintained a very high standard of work and output.

Highly Commended: Tania for helping to win business whilst also mitigating and reducing risk across the business via a single set of pragmatic and robust policies and processes. Her willingness to go the extra mile with a high degree of commerciality and flexibility is driving behaviours that will strengthen and protect the business.

Highly Commended: Adam for supporting an international customer visit to undertake a Sea Acceptance Trial and rectify equipment damage. Adam received compliments, praise, and thanks from the customer as well as the major contractor delivering the ship’s command system. It was an extended 5-week deployment and in spite of the difficulties, Adam’s work and attitude were exemplary and his contribution was invaluable.

Highly Commended: Stuart for project management skills and performance. Stuart has shown tenacity and attention to detail in securing many dozens of Tasks and Spares & Repairs orders and seeing them through to completion, whilst improving project margins and delivering all within agreed timescales.

Highly Commended: Claire for bringing a fresh approach and dynamic to recruitment at SEA, and routinely finding innovative ways to promote and raise awareness of our vacancies. Claire has widened her networks to ensure the right calibre and quality of candidates are being accessed and approached.

Highly Commended: SEA IT Team for keeping the IT system up and operational with very little down time during the pandemic. The SEA team determined how to support remote working on a large scale given the availability of equipment and the existing IT system, and where solutions weren’t readily available, they provided workarounds to ensure the company remained operational.

Highly Commended: Land Project Team for delivering a project which is currently classified. The team worked extraordinary hours under exceptionally difficult circumstances to make sure the project was delivered on time and within budget, despite numerous Covid-related setbacks that affected both the Customer and all of the suppliers.

Cohort also recognised achievement that reflects the Cohort Group Values:

  • We believe in playing our part
  • We believe in being results driven
  • We believe in independent thinking

In this category, our In-Service Support Engineering Team led by Ben Sykes were recognised for their continuation to undertake offsite deployments despite the risks and restrictions during the pandemic. Their dedication ensured that we have honoured our promised to our customers, kept equipment operational, and delivered on important upgrade programmes. In spite of the increased requirements, all work has been undertaken in a great spirit, humour, and collaboration.