Why trust is the cornerstone of successful collaboration

3 January 2023

by Richard Gibbs, Chief Executive Officer, Filtronic

They say that trust is hard-earned, and easily lost and this maxim lies at the heart of any successful business relationship.

Hard-earned trust accumulated by Filtronic over many years of innovative RF design enables us to have those open, honest two-way conversations with customers that only genuine partners can have. When you’re developing high-performance RF solutions at the cutting-edge of technology, such partnership working is critical. Real innovation in technology can only be achieved if there is 100% trust between both parties.

So how do you earn trust in such performance-critical markets? And, once earned, how do you retain it?

History of success

One key factor in establishing your reliability and trustworthiness as a partner is having a proven track record. If you have heritage as a business, it’s one of the most powerful ways to demonstrate your capabilities. Our own track record of successful project and technology delivery over 40 years has earned us a reputation for high standards in design, manufacturing and programme management.

Demonstrable expertise

Next, you need to have expertise that adds value to your customer relationships. Trust is built on performance. Our own customer research has shown that our engineers really differentiate themselves by their levels of expertise. That is the essence of trust – customers trust you as a supplier to bring the specialist expertise they don’t have in-house to solve their specific business challenges.

Independent accreditations

Independent accreditation is an important way to build trust with customers. It’s particularly important when you’re dealing with industries where security and confidentiality are non-negotiable. For example, at Filtronic we have the highest-level security accreditation required to work on defence and aerospace technologies. To achieve this accreditation, our processes, procedures, data management and documentation are rigorously audited to verify their compliance with international standards.  

Protecting ideas

Trust is the bedrock of any partnership that requires ideas or intellectual property (IP) to be shared. Developing new RF technologies means bringing together our background IP with the background IP of our customers, so we can create something new. Customers need reassurances that knowledge will be shared in complete confidentiality. That’s especially relevant when we are dealing with different customers in the same industry. We follow robust practices to ensure that any component we develop or customise for a specific customer remains unique to them.

Innovation know-how

When you’re developing ground-breaking new technologies, customers need partners who will be honest and frank. It’s easy for customers to be seduced by the idea of a new innovation that appears to answer all their problems. But with our expertise and long experience in product development, we bring a dose of realism to the innovation process.

Having been through the iterative steps required to create new products, we know what’s feasible, how long it takes, and how to navigate hurdles along the way towards full scale manufacturing – so we can set realistic expectations and advise customers accordingly.

Big-picture thinking

Customers trust us to deliver technology that is fit for its specific purpose, reliable, and reproducible consistently in a manufacturing environment. We can do this because we have design, manufacturing and testing specialists all under one roof. It means our product designs have high-volume, high-yield manufacturing in mind from the outset, ensuring they are built for real-world applications. Our breadth of expertise enables us to guide customers through the transition from an R&D prototype to a precision product that can be manufactured at scale.

Creativity and adaptability

Trust is also earned in difficult or fast-changing circumstances. In recent years, we’ve seen trust grow in our ability to deliver on our promises at a time of supply chain disruption and global upheaval. Throughout this period, we have found ways to hit deadlines and meet deliverables by being adaptable and thinking differently to solve problems.

Early intervention

One thing we have learned from successfully delivering high-performance technologies over four decades is that the sooner customers bring our expertise into any programme, the better the outcome. Time to market for new technology introduction is critical and making the difficult design decision early in the process can help to ensure that delivery milestones are achieved. Even if we prove not to be the right provider to deliver the project, we can offer essential advice and insights at the inception to save time, resources and effort further down the line.

If you have a communication technology project in mind, don’t waste time trying to solve problems for which you have limited specialist expertise in-house. Filtronic can be trusted to offer the impartial expertise you need to set your project on the right track.

Find out more about Filtronic’s capabilities:

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