Member Success - Simon Crouch

Simon Crouch has been working at Malvern Panalytical since June 2021, and joined as a Senior Developer (now working as a Team Lead Cloud Development Engineer). Since last year he has been working on a project called Smart Return and has dedicated himself to creating an empowering and high-performing culture for his team to thrive in!

Smart Return is a cloud-based system that allows the serving of multiple customers at once, by taking customer data, creating a custom AI model specific to the customer needs and then provides the customer with valuable prediction data.

Simon said, “We’ve recently been working with potential customers in the agriculture sector to predict the amount of fertilizer they need, so that they save cost and reduce negative impact on the environment due to overfertilization.

“When I took over the team, I envisaged that we would use the most modern techniques and technology to implement this new system, and we did it all within 11 months – start to finish! We now have a fully working demonstrable platform which we can show and sell to our clients.”

Simon was able to get this great innovation over the line by collaborating with his team and listening to their needs. He said, “I organized the team, provided the necessary training and mentored junior members. After we architected the solution, we presented it to the executives of Malvern Panalytical and Spectris in November last year.”

To support his project team’s momentum, Simon has been trying to apply his innovative approach to managing the workloads of his colleagues. He explained “I've been pushing the team to achieve more interesting, efficient, better ways of working. For example, I've negotiated that if the team achieved their objectives, we could have more exploratory “innovation time” during Sprints. The idea is that they get dedicated time to work on absolutely whatever they want to during this time.”

“I'm always challenging the team, getting them to question if we can use a newer technology to make us more efficient (as an example, I have used the dictation function in a New Mail in Outlook to write all of what you are reading), and they also challenge me too with their ideas and recommendations. It's truly fantastic to work with such intelligent smart people, but also on an exciting project too.”

Simon secured the First-Class Innovator award for his efforts in creating efficient processes for his team and beyond, and he said, “Honestly, I was very surprised that I had won! I was not expecting it at all! My sincere thanks to my team and any other colleagues I work with who nominated me, it's a great honor - hopefully I can keep my team inspired and inspire others to change the way they work to become more efficient and innovative too!”

“I just want to see Malvern Panalytical succeed, but I also want to see more customers using this new style of selling (like Smart Return),something which I believe is an exciting future prospect sales avenue for Malvern Panalytical to explore.”

A huge congratulations to Simon, we can’t wait to hear more about how this project develops in the future.