Scantime’s Managing Director, Christopher Simm is right. Life’s too short for breakdowns – especially when you’re running a busy shop-floor and each minute of downtime can cost upwards of £82,000 per week, thanks to material waste, missed production targets, and contractual penalties for delayed delivery.
Enter Scantime, stage left.
Meet Scantime
Scantime is a family business that employs time-served engineers to provide a range of automation services, from design and development to refurbishment and disaster recovery.
The team also delivers a range of high-energy PLC training courses, packed with breath-taking tales, industry anecdotes, and essential learning. All of which are City & Guilds Assured and EAL-recognised.
Automation runs the world
If you’re unfamiliar with PLCs, they’re the industrial computers that keep the world running smoothly.
To give them their full title, Programmable Logic Controllers ensure the reliable and continuous operation of manufacturing processes, machinery, and production lines. And they prevent costly downtime.
PLCs are found in places as diverse as Amazon warehouses, amusement parks, and those gargantuan car manufacturing plants that span hundreds of acres and look like something from Bladerunner.
Often mounted inside industrial control panels, PLCs are designed to withstand harsh industrial environments. The rugged rectangular boxes look pretty inconsequential. But if there’s a problem? Things can get very expensive, very quickly.
The Simms
For over 20 years, father and son team, David and Chris Simm, have helped thousands of electrical and mechanical engineers at companies like JLR, Dyson, TfL, Amazon and Honda to keep their PLCs online and their shop-floors working smoothly.
“We believe that PLC training should be engaging and relevant to an engineer’s work environment. We also believe this training should be accessible to any engineer who is expected to work on automated control systems.”
David Simm, Chair
The challenge
In 2025, with an expanded training team, a second training centre about to open, and new Industrial Pro programming training courses in development, David and Chris wanted a way to reflect the company’s ongoing growth and ambitions.
Their existing website was packed with information about each of the courses they run. But there was no clear structure to what was there and the level of detail was overwhelming.
Cue a new website design with Sleeky , an elegant visual company rebrand with graphic designer Sam Petyt, and a brief to me to make sure the copy on the newly signed-off website design reflected their brand positioning, company feel, and made it easy for engineers to find and book the PLC training courses they needed.
Stories that stick
A highly technical four-day training course isn’t most people’s idea of a good time. However, David’s applied his wealth of experience as a controls engineer to design and develop each of Scantime’s PLC training courses, with a particular focus on health and safety thanks to the tales of some of his more hair-raising shop-floor experiences earlier in his career.
“Health and safety didn’t come in until the 1980s. In the 1960s and ‘70s it was a case of just get on with it. Health and safety was a pair of boots. When you didn’t get an electric shock at work, that’s when you started to worry, because that meant the gods up there were lining you up for what we used to call ‘the biggie.’ My biggie happened when I was 17, and it nearly killed me.”
David Simm, Founder and Chair
As well as a clear focus on health and safety, each of Scantime’s courses is packed full of the practical skills engineers need to handle real-world shop-floor scenarios safely and with confidence.
That’s because, as PLCs become more prevalent on today’s shop-floors, the pressure’s on the engineers who understand how to work with PLCs to get everything back up and running quickly.
“We know that it’s always on people’s minds – the ‘what if?’ They’ll leave here with a better idea of how things work and what to do if the line goes down. And they’ll be getting the line going and away before the automation team gets there. Which is a great feeling to have.”
Nathan Ramsahai, Automation Tutor
Developing the Scantime tone of voice
PLC training is a serious business. Scantime make sure it’s never dull. The team’s down-to-earth, no holds barred, honest and to the point training style needed to come through in the brand tone of voice. Along with the Geordie humour and banter that makes people feel at home and know they’re in safe hands.
“The people who do the courses rave about how passionate the tutors are. That’s what draws them in. That’s why they come back. The energy in the room keeps people engaged and involved from start to finish.”
Maiken Davidson, Office Manager
Brand voice approach
I took a three-step approach to this project, starting with a workshop using Nick Parker’s Voicebox method. Working with a small team, we worked through the Voicebox exercises to define an overarching brand tone of voice. The voice we landed on enabled us to be clear and to focus on what mattered, while leaving space to add a layer of warmth with bags of energy and enthusiasm.
Clarify and simplify
With this tone of voice in mind, it was a case of stripping everything away to remove the overwhelming amount of content on the site and creating more clarity. All while taking care not to affect the site’s SEO rankings, built up with care over many years.
“The old site was busy, visually and verbally. We really needed to distill the information and simplify what was there so the new site would make it easy for people to find what they need, all without losing the search engine rankings we’d built up.”
Chris Simm, Managing Director
A nod to brand language and nuance
Chris was very aware of the need to change the flow of copy on each page, so we weren’t simply copy and pasting text and just changing the PLC manufacturer’s name on each course.
Keeping a Human-in-the-Loop
Using Claude, Chris created the basis for the training course pages and then I went in – Human-in-the Loop-style – to make sure we were using the nuanced language of the different PLC manufacturers. From the US brand Allen-Bradley’s RSLogix and Studio 5000 to Germany’s Siemens TIA Portal and STEP7 Professional, we took care to reflect how each company writes about their products.
Bringing the brand tone of voice to life
Finally, I sought out the distinct words and phrases that would make Scantime stand out as a training provider in their marketplace, and wove them into the company’s marketing messaging and tone of voice.
This meant looking at the company’s many glowing TrustPilot reviews for the language their customers use and quizzing the training team to understand the words that engineers might use on the shop-floor when there’s a problem with the PLC.
“From day one, Katherine demonstrated an exceptional understanding of what makes a brand’s voice truly resonate. She took the time to understand our company inside and out, our values, our audience, our quirks, and translated all of that into a tone of voice framework that feels authentically us. It’s warm, distinctive, and consistent, without ever feeling forced or formulaic.”
Chris Simm, Managing Director
Results? A 48% increase in annual turnover
It can be challenging to make a business like a training company stand out. But in this case, David, Chris, and the team made it easy. Since re-developing the brand, tone of voice and assets like their website and brochure, they’ve seen a 48% increase in annual turnover.
And, since the website went live in 2025, their engagement and followers have increased:
YouTube 17K – now 19K
LinkedIn 10K – now 11K
“Since we worked with Katherine, we’ve hired an internal social media team, it has been much easier to onboard them and have them understand exactly how to talk like our company.”
Chris Simm, Managing Director
The new social media team is showcasing the company’s warmth, humour and many, many years of shop-floor experience across the company’s YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram channels with regular features like trainer spotlights and the Monday Maintenance Minute. Have a look if you need a smile today. This is social media marketing done right. And it shows.
They’re also expanding their offer and introducing a range of new Industrial Programming Pro and Industrial Maintenance & Fault Finding Pro 4 PLC training courses as well as a Train the Trainers course to help academic tutors to deliver PLC training that prepares tomorrow’s engineers for the realities of the shop-floor.
“Katherine may be completely crackers, but that’s exactly what makes working with her such a breath of fresh air. Her boundless energy and slightly unhinged enthusiasm turned what could have been a dry exercise into something genuinely exciting. If you need someone to give your brand a voice that genuinely stands out, Katherine is your person. Crackers? Maybe. Brilliant? Absolutely.”
Chris Simm, Managing Director
