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Manufacturing Information Technology systems
News Release from: Rent-I.T. Systems | Subject: MRP Systems
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 12 October 2004
Medical manufacturer operates healthy
production
Meridian Medical, based in Littlehampton with a staff of 80 has manufactured injection moulded and assembled medical devices since 1992, has implemented a new MRP system.
Meridian Medical, based in Littlehampton with a staff of 80 has manufactured injection moulded and assembled medical devices since 1992, has implemented a new MRP system Their previous manufacturing system was Dos-based and did not deliver a full end-to-end solution - basic batch cards were produced which were then manually allocated and purchasing decisions were made from collating a ream of Bill of Materials printouts and building orders
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 28 Jun 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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In 2001 Meridian were recommended to attend a 123MRP evaluation workshop and training course, however the decision to implement a new system was taken 12 months later due to staff changeovers, workloads etc Tony Cooper, Production Manager said; "The system came highly recommended to our MD from our accountants who in turn had seen the system successfully operating in another of their customers.
The rental model allowed us to evaluate it at low cost.
It appeared to offer the planning capabilities we needed to take the company forward in the required direction.
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" In February 2002 several staff attended a 123MRP training course, and an implementation day was planned for the following week.
Said Tony; "We worked over previous weeks to reduce work in progress and orders, then did a dummy run with test data.
After our training we did a training workshop in-house, with staff being cross-trained across departments.
Once people were trained on getting the data into the system we were able to go live the week after." Dave Randall, IT Manager added; "I found it extremely easy to train other staff, even those who had barely used a mouse previously.
123MRP exposed many problems in our business that we needed to fix.
For example, our subcontracting procedures were very ad-hoc - now the process is driven by the system.
This philosophy filters through to all departments." The purchasing department saw immediate and substantial benefits.
Don Barber, Purchasing Manager cited; "A month's purchases used to take about four days.
With today's workload I simply would not be able to survive with the old system.
Previously I had to manually create spreadsheets for current and forthcoming jobs and work out purchases from that - now it is simply the click of a button.
All purchases will be sent via email, with artwork and purchase specification documents available electronically." An obvious knock-on effect from better purchasing is more efficient stock control.
With more staff having immediate access to live data rather than the previously paper-based system there was less margin for error and more compliance to company processes.
Previously stock inaccuracies ran at around 30% during rolling stock checks.
These are now down to 6.5% and Meridian is confident that this will come down further still.
The shopfloor data capture facility allows Meridian the ability to pinpoint at what stage a works order is in the production process.
The major ongoing benefit has been the ability to analyse data over and above 123MRP's standard reports.
Tony added; "We were very restricted in what data we could view on our old system, and writing reports required a scripting language.
With 123MRP we have written dozens of bespoke reports in Microsoft Access.
As a result we have immediate access to data that we simply could not see before and do not have to rely on a supplier to provide a custom report.? By 2004 the company's overall business had grown by 25% with the despatch department seeing a 100% increase in throughput, however Meridian has not needed to increase administration staff.
Tony concluded: "We have become far more disciplined and efficient in what we do.
The amount of paper we generate has drastically reduced - the majority of our documentation is now held electronically.
50% of my time has changed from my previous role - I now control and plan production rather than performing functions myself.
Our Despatch Manager, who was historically the most resistant to change is now the system's strongest advocate as he is in total control.".
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