Product category:
ERP and MRP systems and software
News Release from: K3 Business Technology Group | Subject: K3 ERP system
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 23 December 2002
Stock savings pay for ERP system
Stock savings in excess of 30% - around GBP 300,000 - have more than paid for a new computerised manufacturing system installed by a lighting manufacturer.
Stock savings in excess of 30% have more than paid for a new computerised manufacturing system installed by lighting specialist Jerrard Bros With space at a premium at its central Croydon factory, efficient warehousing and stockholdings are extremely important and K3 Business Technology's ERP system has reduced stock levels from GBP 900,000 to GBP 600,000
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 24 Apr 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Since installing the system three years ago the company's product lines have expanded but stock levels have remained constant.
Without the extra products, stocks would have dropped even further to GBP 500,000.
Stock obsolescence and stockouts have also dramatically reduced.
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Jerrard Bros supplies specialist lighting to a world-wide market.
In 1996 the company divided into two divisions: Arcadia, which makes and sells aquarium lighting products and accessories to 30 countries world-wide, including 90 pet wholesalers in the UK; and Jerrards which manufactures lighting for point-of-sale, signmakers, shopfitters and amusement machines.
End retailers include Shell, BP, Revlon, L'Oreal, Superdrug and Sainsbury.
The company has a turnover of GBP 4.7 million and employs 60 people.
Typical manufacturing operations at the site include sheetmetalworking - using CNC controlled presses - cable cutting, stripping and terminating, injection moulding, painting, assembly and packing.
It has been using K3's Micross manufacturing control system for 10 years and in 1999 decided to purchase a new package offering improvements that would serve the company for another 10 years.
"We considered other software suppliers but concluded that as we had such good support from K3 this was an important deciding factor in choosing its MFW system," says Managing Director Gerard Oates.
"We took the view that it was well worth getting K3 fully involved in our implementation project.
They prepared a detailed plan and supported us with training and consultancy.
A lot more data was needed for MFW so we simply transferred our existing data onto Excel spreadsheets, added the extra information and imported it into MFW using macros.
The changeover went very smoothly and our staff find that MFW is very intuitive and user friendly.
"On the sales side it is extremely flexible in maintaining our price lists and volume discount structures, and it also handles our export and foreign currency requirements very well.
We also changed our accounts system over to Great Plains Dynamics which has a good integration with MFW so we only input the data once." The software handles the company's manufacturing requirements for both make-to-stock for the Arcadia side of the business and make-to-order for Jerrards.
Sales of Arcadia's products are reasonably predictable and suit the forecasting side of MFW's MRP module - which is run every day - while Jerrards' products are more difficult but common parts enable forecasting at the component level.
MFW is a 32-bit system with over 30 modules providing a fully integrated ERP system on Windows and Windows NT platforms.
The company uses MFW modules such as sales, purchase and shopfloor order processing, inventory control, costing, repetitive manufacturing, bills of materials, MRP and financials.
The system runs on two fault tolerant NT Dell servers.
The company runs the repetitive manufacturing module for Arcadia and has eliminated a lot of paperwork.
Instead of raising works order documentation and issuing to the shop floor, a Kanban docket system is now used which gives full control of stock.
Arcadia needs the support of a good flexible system because it is a highly efficient operation with extremely short lead times - typically three days from design to despatch.
Design is carried out on a state-of-the-art, SolidEdge 3D solid modelling system which creates a BOM that can be transferred easily to MFW.
The company is now in the process of implementing the MFW Sales Manager module which helps prepare quotations.
It takes the costs from existing manufactured items and amends them.
Quotes can be quickly converted into sales orders.
Detailed information on the quote success rate is also available and prospective customers can be monitored.
The next module to be implemented will be Sub-contracting for controlling the workflow between the company and its sub-contractors.
"One of the good things about MFW is that we can easily extract information with its inbuilt Crystal report writer for standard management reporting," says Gerard Oates.
"And the Alert Manager feature, which is management by exception, is very useful for automatically sending our key customers order status reports through the internet.
It is also useful for automatically alerting our staff about a whole host of exceptions, such as overdue works orders.
We can concentrate on things that matter rather than reading pages of reports and hoping to pick out the anomalies." The company's IT Administrator Jeremy Desouza adds: "MFW retains all the transactions so, for example, we can use MS Access to analyse the sales database and look at product sales going back years by profit, market, country or whatever we like.
It also retains stock transactions through time enabling us to check back and see how close we were running the buffer stocks.
This allows us to reduce reorder quantities and adjust the levels.
"The system's visual Bill of Materials is also very good as it enables us to quickly see our four-level BOM structure on the screen for any of our 5,000 product lines.
We have recently added K3's Enquiry Manager which enables us to look at data from various MFW modules on the screen at the same time, allowing users to tailor what they want to see on their screens." Gerard Oates has been impressed by the level of customer service received from K3.
"Six months ago, for example, John Gardiner, the K3 Account Manager offered to visit us and carry out a free 'health check' to see if he could identify any areas for improvement.
He has an extremely helpful attitude and spotted that we had separate works orders for each level of the BOM and suggested it could be done with just one works order for each product type.
A K3 consultant checked it out and now we've reduced shop floor documentation by 50% and given a number of people more hours in the week.
"I also think active participation in the K3 user group is essential for generating feedback and providing a discussion forum for system upgrades.
We correspond via the web with other users, comparing notes, exchanging new Crystal reports and checking to see if there are more efficient processes and work methods we can adopt.".
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