Buy and build

The acquisition follows several successful product pilots with Bentley Motors, Bombardier Aerospace and hundreds of manufacturing SMEs, demonstrating the market-readiness of Valuechain.com’s own app technology. The buy and build strategy, which is focused on leveraging existing client bases to promote viral growth, is part of a multi-stream growth strategy.

Valuechain.com currently has three divisions: Business and Supply Chain Intelligence, for larger manufacturing organisations and industry associations; Valuechain App Store, providing productivity improvement solutions for manufacturing companies at all tiers of the supply chain; and Enterprise Systems for manufacturing SMEs, to streamline and control business processes.

Tricorn Systems based in Farnham Surrey, has been providing enterprise solutions to manufacturing SMEs for more than 20 years.

Discussing the deal, Tom Dawes, CEO of Valuechain.com explained: “Tricorn deeply understand manufacturing SMEs and has developed a loyal client base through continuous technology innovation and excellent customer service. By joining forces we can immediately offer Tricorn clients additional productivity improvement solutions and a collaborative platform to connect with their supply chain partners.

“The Tricorn team is well established and we plan to build on this core infrastructure to scale up our operations in the UK and overseas through strategic global partnerships,” he added. “This is the first of several acquisitions we have planned to consolidate niche technology companies that service the manufacturing SME sector. We are really excited about the journey we have started.”

Valuechain.com is a regional success story. The designs for the productivity solutions originated from PhD research by company founders Tom Dawes and Haifeng Guo while studying at University of Liverpool.

Since forming the business in 2010 the founders have retained 100% of the company by funding product development and commercialisation primarily through organic growth and Government innovation funding.

To minimise operating costs from the outset, Valuechain.com established their own offshore development, testing and support teams in China and India with the UK team focused on systems design and business development.

Valuechain.com www.valuechain.com

Tricorn www.tricornsystems.co.uk