UK: Most Improved Factory - CCL Custom Manufacturing.

Sponsor - British Standards Institution (BSI).

Few winners of our Most Improved category can boast such an inauspicious start to manufacturing excellence as CCL's Scunthorpe personal care products bottling and aerosol filling plant. It was opened as a greenfield site in 1988, but the company that set it up promptly went bankrupt in 1990.

It was then acquired by Canadian multinational CCL. Managing director John Scruton, who spent eight years working in Canada for CCL, moved back to England to manage both the Scunthorpe site and another factory in Grimsby.