Using design to empower UK industry to work smarter and faster
For many manufacturers, the biggest barrier to innovation isn't a lack of ideas – it's the significant time and staff bandwidth required to validate them. Making unproven changes to a live factory floor carries far too much risk – even minor errors can cause expensive downtime and slash production rates – design ideas must be fully validated before going live. This requirement places a heavy strain on staff who are already busy with day-to-day production.
Here at the AMRC, we eliminate these constraints and remove the risk from design innovation. Through rapid, high-accuracy problem-solving, we validate your concepts early, allowing you to test and perfect ideas and overcome obstacles before they ever touch the production line. This approach removes some of the burden from your own personnel and boosts operational efficiency without risking costly factory downtime, ultimately accelerating your time-to-market and seamlessly transforming high-value concepts into scalable, real-world solutions.
De-risking innovation
We've designed everything from consumer goods to heavy industrial infrastructure. From an initial idea to a working prototype – and throughout every development step in between – we're using advanced design and manufacturing methodologies to bring cutting-edge insight and enhanced manufacturing processes to UK businesses.
- Take the risk out of innovation: Our dedicated, cutting-edge facilities allow you to experiment with new ways of working to accelerate innovation while keeping your everyday operations running – giving you the freedom to rapidly iterate and validate concepts within a highly controlled setting.
- Access our expertise and technology: Whether you're a startup with a great product idea or one of the biggest names in engineering, we can help you bring your products to market.
- An extension to your team: Our hugely experienced team collaborates directly with your people to come up with the right solutions to overcome complex technical challenges.
Key capabilities
We accelerate the journey from concept to market – taking you from a low TRL (Technology Readiness Level) initial concept through to a finished, manufacturing-ready product.
Whether you need end-to-end support – from initial requirements and concept generation to simulation, digital prototyping, and verification – or want us to help identify and coordinate potential partners and suppliers, we streamline your cycle times. We can even help your business unlock investment and funding to take your product to the next step of commercialisation.
Design is a highly versatile discipline, and our capabilities span its entire spectrum. We provide expertise in everything from mechanical design, design for manufacture, design for assembly and disassembly, to design for electronics. Our team uses the latest techniques, including advanced thermal analysis, robotics, VR/AR, simulation, digital prototyping, and verification.
We have the expertise to manage the whole lifecycle of a product, steering UK manufacturing towards a circular economy. Our design process aligns with the entire product lifecycle – enabling success across concept, assessment, demonstration, manufacture, in-service, and disposal. By deploying advanced data capture methodologies – including Model-Based Definition (MBD) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) – we establish the Digital Thread as a primary enabling technology for through-lifecycle engineering. This data backbone tracks a product from inception to decommissioning, facilitating component certification via high-fidelity digital simulation. By minimising physical prototyping requirements, this approach substantially compresses product development lifecycles (PDL) and reduces overall time-to-market.
Make design work for your business
Choose to collaborate with us and we'll roll up our sleeves and work alongside you, giving you direct access to a multidisciplinary team of expert industrial designers, product designers, mechanical engineers, electronics hardware engineers and software engineers, researchers, project managers and prototyping technicians.
Using cutting-edge tools and methods, we create bespoke design solutions to your meet your technical challenges. From data capture to 3D printing, we'll introduce new digital technologies into your workflows and demonstrate how they can improve your products or design processes.
We work across a range of sectors, including aerospace, nuclear and defence. This broad experience means we can take an idea from one industry and apply it to another – providing you with novel solutions you may not have considered.
Whether you want to make a new component lighter, use digital tools to generate fresh ideas, or test your design in a physical or virtual environment, we have the knowledge, expertise and capabilities.
Discover what design can do for you
Speak to our experts to learn how design can speed up your manufacturing workflows.