About
My name is Neill Forrest and welcome to my business, NFor Consulting Ltd. I am a results-oriented executive level leader/ engineering professional having had a very successful 34 year career at Rolls-Royce plc. Over 25 of my 34 years at Rolls-Royce were in senior leadership positions. I have a proven track record in strategic business development, major capital project delivery from concept to operational hand over, product V&V and engineering and operations leadership. I have world leading expertise in product development, testing and general experimental capability. I am a generalist change agent with a wide strategic perspective and have successfully implemented multiple large (£10M-£100Ms each), interdependent, collaborative and multinational projects with a pragmatic “can do” approach. I am a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IMechE. I am a Mechanical Engineering Graduate from Aberdeen University and served a craft apprenticeship with John Wood Group.
I recently left Rolls-Royce plc to seek some new and exciting challenges. My role when I left was as a Senior Fellow - Verification, Test and Measurement. The “Senior Fellow” role is the pinnacle of technical achievement within Rolls-Royce. The role served the entire RR business and reflects world leading expertise, technical capability and strategic and agile thinking and doing in your field of expertise. There are only c.10 Senior Fellows at any one time from some 19,000 Engineers in a £15Bn turnover Company. I, like my peers in their respective fields, were there to provide leadership, capability, agenda setting and a robust workforce plan with processes that can be applied to Company critical opportunities or issues.
Most of my time at RR was spent on product development and the establishment of experimental capability that was essential route to market capability. This ranged from measurement capability through data acquisition and management strategies to the provision of major unique capital projects such as the Ultrafan Gearbox test facility. I defined, made the engineering, operational and business cases for, and delivered, the test capability strategy for RR's gas turbine portfolio (Civil, Defence and Industrial). I worked with and led some great teams from inside and outside the Business. I defined the strategic business and capability needs for all new and existing facilities and played a strategic executive role in their delivery or de-commissioning. This totalled over £400M of capital investment projects including site closures and establishing new sites in several global locations.That capability has been a key elements of the Company’s growth during that time. A more detailed breakdown of some of the projects undertaken is in the “work” section of this website.
59 bed at NASA John C Stennis, Mississippi
In addition to my product development/ experimental capability experience I have substantive additional experience. I was the sole engineer deployed to a task force to get the Rolls-Royce Deutschland (then BMW Rolls-Royce) business jet division near Berlin established and fully operational. I served as Engineering & Technology Director for the "Transmissions and Structures” supply chain unit. I was also directly accountable for running the Civil Aerospace Experimental Operations as General Manager. That was a c. 850 headcount and c.£140m (in today’s money) cashflow business. In parallel I helped solve major issues with several of the Company's products, conducted several key major quality investigations and regularly sat on product business and technical governance review boards. I have chaired and co-chaired two different industry advisory committees. I also had a 3 years tenure as Visiting Professor of Aerospace Strategy at Sheffield University.