Poor weather, cheap foreign imports and foot-and-mouth have all affected sales.

STOP PRESS...

Since our visit, Raleigh has announced that it's shutting the factory at the end of 2002. Nearly three hundred jobs will be lost. The company blamed cheap imports from the Far East. Some design and distribution work will still be done in Nottingham.

Manufacturers have had to cut back, more than 40 jobs have gone at Raleigh's factory in Nottingham.

But the firm says it is fighting back, offering initiatives like customised bikes and after sales advice.

Sold-off

Two years ago, Raleigh bicycles sold off its bike making machinery in a bid to cut costs and save money.

The company's Nottingham factory is only an assembly plant, most of the parts are imported.

The firm produces half a million bikes a year across the full Raleigh range with nearly all being sold in the UK.

Cards are used to keep track of batches

Production is still largely done by hand. Workers use the batch production method - making up to 600 bikes of a particular model at any one time.

Cycling heritage

Raleigh is one the great British manufacturing names.

It was founded in 1888 when Sir Frank Bowden bought an interest in a small bicycle company on Raleigh Street in Nottingham.

The Raleigh Bicycle Company was formed in 1890, and in 1896 it built the largest cycle factory in the world.

In its heyday, the company employed 7,000 people.

But like many areas of manufacturing, it has since shrunk.

Its 1950s purpose-built factory on Triumph Road in Nottingham now employs just 470 permanent workers, with numbers swelling to 600 as seasonal staff are taken on to prepare for the Christmas boom in bike sales.

You've seen the Raleigh bike factory - but what about the rest.

Factories come in all sorts of shape and sizes and make things in as many different ways.

Putting them into categories makes it easier to work out what's going on.

Just think...

Whatever a business produces, it wants to know how to make things efficiently. So try asking some questions.

Are the things you want to make all the same?

Do they need individual attention?

Are there lots of different stages?

Do you want different varieties of the same product?

Test the questions on the following products: