Joshua King, Head of Business at The Scotsman gets a tour of the Hewlett Packard Technology Renewal Centre, Erskine.
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00:00I'm Joshua King, Head of Business for The Scotsman and we're here in a quiet corner of
00:05Western Scotland in Erskine to see the Hewlett Packard Technology Renewal Centre. I don't quite
00:10know what to expect but this is one of the most important facilities of its kind in the entire
00:16world. So we're going to get a behind-the-scenes tour, we're going to look at what works here
00:20and we're going to meet some of the people that work here as well.
00:40It's a really important facility for us. Not only does it have a number of our digital sales teams
00:47and our operation supply teams, it holds our Technology Renewal Centre which is one of the
00:56biggest on the planet. It's the biggest in fact Technology Renewal Centre which refurbs
01:01equipment, giving equipment a second life and also renewing equipment where we are sending very
01:09little to the landfill. So having the facility which is part of Hewlett Packard Enterprises
01:14Financial Services Organisation is providing a second life for technology. It's reducing
01:22our carbon emissions and our greenhouse gases on the planet and providing an alternative for
01:27businesses who are looking for sustainable solutions in more cost-effective ways.
01:33What kind of equipment are you getting through the door here then? What examples of things that
01:36you'd be refurbishing would be going back out to market? All sorts and just for clarity it's not
01:40just HPE equipment. So we take all technology equipment from all vendors, be it laptops, printers,
01:47server devices, networking switches. So it's a huge operation over a very large square footage
01:53where we take in all sorts of technology. And in terms of staff, it's physically a huge facility.
01:59How many local staff are employed here? So we've got about 450 staff who are permanently based at
02:05the site. So if I think about the offices that I'm responsible for, it's one of our largest.
02:13Hi there, my name is Jacket Afferty and I'm Head of European Operations for Financial Services.
02:18Jack, can we just have a look around the facility? Everyone's hard at work. I understand
02:23the workforce is largely local and you are yourself as well.
02:26Oh to me that's important, you know, obviously helping the local community as well.
02:31And one thing about this site, it was always within a 20 mile radius, you know, and we do have
02:36that with financial services staff, you know, maybe one employee travels an hour, everybody else is
02:41within 15-20 minutes. I'm 15-20 minutes, you know, I used to take a ferry to work but I became so
02:47passionate about this place I needed to move closer. So I'm only 20 minutes away, so I want to be
02:52first in, I want to be last out and that's the way we work here. Because we feel as if we've got a
02:56community here, you know, there's something I always wanted to build when I had the opportunity
03:00to have my own and we support this business, you know, is get that connection back, you know, and
03:05I've got a lot of family and friends down in the process as well. I'm lucky enough to have my son
03:09in the operations as well, so it's just a great place to work, you know, and as I say the tenure
03:15is great, you know, good conditions. People don't want to leave here, you know, it's the best place
03:20they could be with the current skills they have anyway and they certainly don't need to travel
03:23too far because this used to be part of Silicon Glen, if you're too young to remember who Silicon
03:28Glen was. Every American company had a facility in the central belt, this is the only one that's left,
03:34you know, and there's a reason behind that, it's because my attitude, you know, and my performance
03:38and my knowledge, you know, has kept us here for a very very long time and hopefully for a lot longer.
03:45Well HPA have described the facility as a jewel in the crown, many people might expect facilities
03:51like this to be somewhere more central or perhaps in Europe after Brexit, but it's been kept here,
03:56why do you think that is, is that down to the people? Both people and facility, I mean you look
04:00back, you know, this facility opened in December of 1987 as a compound facility, you know, it was
04:06world-class in terms of the volumes they were producing across all of EMEA, so we gained an
04:12awful lot of experience through supply chain from building desktops, you know, to bloggables we
04:17called them at the time, but it certainly wasn't notebooks, through to servers and business
04:21catacombs, so over the last 30 odd years we've had so much experience here, why wouldn't you keep it
04:27in Erskine? You know, I think it was an absolute no-brainer to bring it here and we believe we've
04:32not let anybody down anyway. And in terms of that expertise, you've got people who've worked here
04:36many many years, many decades, walking around we can see younger, newer staff as well. Yeah.
04:42What are you doing to pass that expertise on to them? Yeah, I thought, I mean really what we've done
04:46myself and David Connell, the Global Engineering Manager, we looked at that and said, right, we need
04:49to start, you know, looking at future, you know, so we started, you know, bringing some educated
04:54individuals and start, you know, apprenticeship programs, you know, and just bring the younger
04:59generation to pick up all that knowledge that we've gained over the last 37 years, so, you know,
05:05there is a lot of younger guns, we call them really, in the process, but they're learning and picking
05:11up skills from the older senior generation like myself, you know, but the experience we have here,
05:17you won't get it anywhere else in the world, I can assure you, you know, but it's good to see
05:21that younger generation hopefully having similar tenure as ourselves. We've spent a couple of hours
05:26now here at Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Technology Renewal Centre, what they call their TRC.
05:32We're here in the quiet corner of West Scotland, we're in Erskine, and it's been remarkable seeing
05:37what they do in a building that seems quite unassuming, but hundreds of staff, highly trained,
05:42highly skilled staff, who've worked here for many years. We've got people from different generations
05:48of the same family are working here on some of the most high-tech equipment in the world
05:52for some of the biggest clients in the world. It's a multi-billion dollar industry and this facility
05:58could feasibly be anywhere in the world, but it's stayed here in Erskine through Brexit, through
06:03Covid, and from what we've seen and what we've heard, that's down to the passion, commitment and
06:08skills of the workforce. We've also heard that with technology continuing to speed up in its pace
06:13and with the development of AI, facilities like this taking old or damaged equipment and repurposing
06:20it will become ever more important, so I think the future is bright for the TRC here in Erskine
06:25and for the local area.