Finding Great Partners

When it opens in 2025, we want the Global Centre of Rail Excellence to be a place where great people and ideas come together – a site where skilled rail engineers, creative technicians and talented innovators from around the world can work in partnership to develop, test and refine exciting new technologies that will become the backbone of the stronger, greener and more affordable rail network we need for tomorrow.

And that spirit of partnership working won’t be confined to what gets tested on the tracks. As we build the GCRE business itself, we’re intent on developing the company in that same, spirit of collaboration – becoming an organisation that forges strong, working relationships with the clients and supply chain we work with.

Nowhere are those relationships more important than in the communities near to the site. For us, working with great local businesses in the Dulais and Swansea Valleys, as well as the wider region, will be critical to our success. As a business we want GCRE to develop a strong, grounded supply chain so that from construction to operation, we are utilising local skills, knowledge and expertise to make the Global Centre of Rail Excellence the international success we know it can be.

One of the important local relationships that we’ve developed in recent months is with Seren Global Media – an established creative agency based in Swansea that provides public relations, strategy and market research advice to firms right across the UK. We’ve been working with Seren for the last few months to develop a new website for the GCRE business and to help us establish a stronger social media presence.

The collaboration came about as a result of a ‘Meet the Buyer’ event we held in south Wales back in November last year. The event helped demonstrate to local and regional businesses some of the exciting opportunities coming up to work with GCRE as we start construction of the site and open our first storage facilities later this year.

Seren began talking to us about our website needs and they were the first company to secure a contract from the event. Working alongside their partners WebAdept UK based in Haverfordwest, they helped us go live with our new website gcre.wales in late December 2022.

What was great about working with the Seren Global Media team was their experience and their can do attitude. The Seren team, led by Grant Nicholas and Wyn Jenkins, helped us understand what we needed and contributed ideas and creativity about how to get the most out of our new site. The product we got at the end was exactly what we wanted – a modern, accessible and professional website that helps us tell the GCRE story. We didn’t have to search across the globe, the partner we needed was right on our doorstep.

Of course a contract for a website is just a very small part of our story, but what this example represents for us at GCRE is the way in which we want to go on building our business. We want the Global Centre of Rail Excellence to be not just a commercial success but one that can have a positive impact locally – a positive impact established through strong local partnerships with the businesses and communities near to the site.

Part of what we’ll use the new website that Seren have developed for us is to tell more stories like this. We’ll try to draw out the ways in which the Global Centre of Rail Excellence is not simply a chance to build a world class rail innovation facility – but the opportunity to have a positive impact on the local area around the site through contributions to the foundational economy and the development of strong working relationships with businesses and communities nearby.

And in the meantime, if anyone needs a website, we can recommend just the people to help!

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