Envisioning Direction

John Lewis visits Lewes-based display specialist Hanover Displays to find out the latest from founder Gavin Williams

Buses need destination displays that are easy to read in all conditions; and producing displays with top-notch clarity is what Hanover Displays has specialised in ever since Gavin Williams founded the company in the mid-1980s.

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With an annual turnover that could reach £50m this year and 300 employees – 250 of whom work in the UK – it has evolved into a bus industry success story, and is continuing to grow.

With factories in the UK and USA, it produces over 45,000 units annually and ships them to customers in over 75 countries. Everything is thoroughly tested before it is sent out.

Before Gavin founded Hanover Displays he had been European Manager for an American company called Luminator. It made passenger destination displays using flip-dot technology (originally developed by Ferranti-Packard) and it was Gavin who got Luminator into Europe.

In 1985 however he left the firm, set up his own business, and with Luminator’s agreement initially marketed versions of their products that he had modified in order to meet the needs of European customers.

“I rented an office and in my first year took on technical director Bill Goodchild,” Gavin recalled. “The problem was that I ended up using the office as a factory and I was getting swarf in the carpet, so I increasingly ended up operating out of Bill’s house in the Hanover area of Brighton.”

Hence the name of today’s firm. “It made sense because it means something in three important languages – English, German and French – and the implied German link suggested high-quality products,” Gavin said. He began work on product development.

Fresh ideas

“Back in those days all the flip-dot displays on the market were character-based,” he remembered. “They were seven dots high by five dots wide.

“My idea was to take a series of strips, stick them together and create a dot matrix sign,” he said. “A bus company in Lausanne, Switzerland said it would take displays using this technology, I talked to Luminator, and I told the Americans that I would buy the strips through them so they would be in on the deal.

“Initially they were keen, but then they had second thoughts, terminated the agreement, sued me and lost.”

By now it was 1986 and he was making displays in a domestic living room. He realised that he needed a proper factory, and found suitable premises in Lewes.

The family-owned business – Gavin’s twin sons Dave and Andy are Managing Director and Sales Director respectively – has been based in the East Sussex town ever since. The premises play host to Hanover’s central technical team and repairs department as well as its manufacturing activities.

By this time he had recruited a young man from Brighton called Alan Cressey to assist him. Today Alan is Hanover’s UK Sales Manager.

Hanover was by no means the only company supplying flip-dot signs to British operators. “We had competitors, and a number of firms were of course promoting electric signs and printed blinds,” Gavin said. “If a blind is brand-new then the silk-screen printing process gives you a better rendition of the typeface than a dot-matrix will,” he continued.

“Our argument against them, though, was that because the destinations they showed had to be printed on them, the number they could display was limited,” he said. “That meant operators faced difficulties if they wanted to move buses onto another route.

“With flip-dot displays you could change them to whatever destination you wanted, and do so quickly,” he added. “So bus companies wanted what we had to offer, but bus builders weren’t so keen.

“They wanted to sell what they had already got.”

A way in

Gavin’s response was to by-pass them and go straight to the operators. His reasoning was that if they were satisfied with what Hanover had to offer, then they would insist that the bus builders fitted the products they wanted.

“We went to Brighton & Hove initially, and it was an approach that worked,” he said. “It was the way in for us.”

Gavin’s pitch was that operators should opt for Hanover’s flip-dot displays because they were more reliable than anything that was on offer from its rivals.

“We were electronic engineers and many of them were not,” he explained. “Our view was that although flip-dots would stick occasionally, solid-state electronics lay at the heart of our systems, and if displays made on this basis were properly designed and manufactured, then they shouldn’t go wrong.”

“It was a hard message to get across but we were so confident about the reliability of our products that eventually we hit upon the idea of selling them with a lifetime guarantee,” he continued.

“That made us popular with our customers, but not quite so popular with our competitors, because in most cases they wouldn’t guarantee their displays for more than a year.”

The legality of guaranteeing something for life was challenged in Germany by one of the aforementioned rivals, but was not challenged anywhere else, Gavin notes. Hanover responded by asking individual clients how long a guarantee they wanted, and tailoring a package accordingly.

Expansion

The reference to Germany highlights the speed at which Hanover moved into export markets.

France was one of the first. “French public transport was more advanced and better financed than was the case in the UK, and we set up an operation over there in 1987,” said Gavin. Today it has operations in a host of overseas countries including Spain, Italy and Australia as well as the USA, France and Germany.

Hanover started offering displays that used LEDs around 15 years ago, and sold them alongside flip-dots for several years. The former gradually ousted the latter as the price of LEDs came down.

“LEDs are completely solid-state and their dots can never get stuck,” remarked Gavin.

Full-colour as well as monochrome LED panels are available with the option of mixing the two, with the route number displayed in colour. Panels can be curved, and the sign system is programmed using Hanover’s HELEN Windows-based software which allows messages to be displayed in multiple languages and a wide variety of presentation styles. The system is driven by a dedicated controller which doubles as the driver interface.

The product

Designing LED-based displays is a challenge, says Gavin, because they have to function as effectively in bright sunshine as they do at night. “You have to achieve the maximum contrast ratio and avoid reflections,” he observed.

The clarity will become even greater as Hanover introduces high resolution LED displays. “They use 50 times the number of LEDs packed very close together,” he said. The displays have gone beyond the prototype stage.

“We’ve got seven vehicles on trial with them in London, one in Dubai, one with Lothian Buses, and one with Reading Buses,” said Gavin. “In fact Reading has already committed to fitting five buses with them so we’ve got our first order.”

While designing and manufacturing destination displays is Hanover’s core activity, it has other products in its portfolio.

They include ‘This Stop’ and ‘Next Stop’ displays and multi-media screens that can be used for messages the operator wants to promote and for location-specific advertising. A map of the route and the destinations that are served can be shown and passengers can be told for example that a particular stop is a two-minute walk from Tesco.

The displays and screens are controlled by a powerful on-board computer – the HTC (Hanover Transport Computer).

Also available are audio announcement systems for the blind and partially-sighted. They can, among other things, tell people waiting at a stop the number of the bus that has just arrived and where it is going. Hanover can equip stops with signs that provide real-time estimated arrival and departure times along with other scheduling information.

“We also supply interior LED strip-lighting for buses,” Gavin said.

Challenges in the future

Hanover is now an established OE supplier to virtually all of the leading bus manufacturers and its own next stop could be the rail industry.

“We already supply quite a bit of equipment that is fitted to trams,” he said. “So looking at rail makes a lot of sense.

“Brexit is a concern,” he continued. “Without legislative divergence Brexit is pointless, but paradoxically with any divergence our ports will be paralysed with 14,000 trucks a day.

“There is no solution,” he said. “We are an island state and very vulnerable to disruption at our ports.

“Over the last 30 years we have developed the ‘just-in-time’ frictionless trade required by European customers and to have this subjugated now to narrow political interests is very disappointing.

With more than 50% of our business being in the wider European market it means that our next manufacturing investment is likely to be over there.

“I feel let down by my country.”

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