Managing competitiveness: 9 - Manufacturing excellence at Pressweld - Against a bleak outlook for much of the UK engineering sector, a small Gloucesterbased automotive firm is bucking the trend. Last year. Pressweld won an award for manufacturing excellence at the prestigious MX2000 awards. Commenting on the firm's success, the judging panel said: "Pressweld has excelled in terms of innovation in both process and product, and in doing so transformed itself into a highly competitive organisation." In the latest in our series on managing competitiveness, IRS visited the firm to explore the employment policies behind the firm's success. The programme of change has helped to achieve a rise in profitability in the face of intense cost pressures, a decline in absence rates, and an end to the old practice of taking on temporarv workers to deal with peaks in demand.