How many people remember the tuneful melody of a 14.4k dial up modem in the world of 12Mb or higher broadband? Or the simplistic look and feel of an old Nokia ‘brick phone’ when handling the latest I-phone? Just 2 simple examples that show the technology generation gap is real and evident all around us, with the gaps between distinct technological generations are getting smaller all the time.

A prevailing ‘rip and replace’ attitude may be fine when it comes to replacing a £30 modem but may be not as acceptable when it involves decades of IT investment in hardware and software costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Yet this is the dilemma UK manufacturers at every level are facing when looking to replace costly legacy Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) systems or multiple individual legacy systems with a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The root cause of the problem is the inherent link between ERP and the underlying technology on which it sits and like the dialup modem and latest broadband router, legacy systems and modern ERP solutions are technological worlds apart.

Old dogs and new tricks?

Just as with a human generation gap, effective inter-generational communication is never that easy to achieve and may be aggravated by certain circumstances. For example, systems based on early generation technology can be very restrictive in the way they access, process and output the data they contain. And like many ‘old dogs’, it’s not too easy to teach them new tricks.

Some systems, however, are taught new tricks by means of continual modification over the years and a high degree of specialization known only to a select group of people within a company – at times just one single person. A change of job, injury or death can render such systems as inaccessible, impenetrable and completely incapable of being modified to interact with other systems.

As if this wasn’t enough of a threat, a number of these older systems may also have been discontinued by their former developers or may have actually outlived their authors - in either case, support is non-existent and there is no further development potential. In any scenario, intercommunication between the generations is a real problem manufacturers have to grapple with. Yet the truth is that each of these older systems contains important data – often so invaluable to the company and so central to its running that any change is fraught with difficulties.

UAV ENGINES

This is precisely the problem UAV Engines Limited found itself in. From an original product range of 3 basic engine types, UEL has seen spectacular growth resulting from an increasing requirement for surveillance Unmanned Aeronautical Vehicles (UAVs). The company now has 5 major product lines but each of these is highly customisable and configurable depending on customer specification.

As Nathan Bailey, UEL’s Operations Manager remarks: “This is further complicated by the fact that our order size ranges from one-offs to over 700 and each rotary engine having a minimum of 180 unique top line components with a Bill of Materials (BOM) structure 14 levels deep."

The ongoing success of the company and the growing number of its products being used in the marketplace has necessarily given rise to a secondary business stream of supplying spare parts. Whereas the engine/spares ratio used to be 85/15, it is now 50/50 and this has been a major contribution to the range of challenges now facing the company. This combined with supplier relationship challenges resulting from sourcing components of a consistently high quality level became simply too much for UEL’s existing legacy systems.

The central problem was an in-house, bespoke system written by a former employee in 1991 that connected in limited ways to UEL’s other systems. While it initially did everything, it was completely reliant on the expert knowledge of its creator for upkeep and development so when the employee left the company, UEL found itself exposed. While able to keep the system running after a fashion, it was becoming increasingly clear that it was getting old and had no forward development potential. UEL approached a variety of programmers with a view to updating the system but none were prepared to undertake the task. As Bailey comments: “We knew then that we needed an ‘off the shelf’ system.”

Off the shelf yet specialist

The company also realised that it needed a true, specialist manufacturing system. Several further systems were evaluated with the decision ultimately being taken for EFACS E/8 from Exel. Bailey explains why: “I was most impressed by the combination of underlying technology and system functionality. The SQL backend, the familiarity of a web browser, the ease of configuration, the ease of using the ADAPT programming language to modify the system yourself, all combined to make EFACS the clear choice for us.”

Equally important was the technology potential within EFACS to act as a central data repository or failing that, to link and synchronise UEL’s systems in order to keep all data up to date. This had not been possible due to the database structure within the previous system and various encryption difficulties. However, after data testing exposed significant weaknesses in the quality of data within the former system, UEL took the strategic decision to use EFACS E/8 in a synchronising role with the company’s other systems.

From a technology generation gap perspective, the main challenge now lay in consolidating the 3 existing data sources of UEL’s redundant bespoke system, its outgoing system and its current live PDM system.

Bailey explains how they dealt with this: “The BOM information from our bespoke system was very good but the sales/customer information was obviously out of date. The BOM data from the outgoing system was poor but the accounts and customer data was good while the PDM system had valuable supporting BOM data. We therefore did a 3 tier implementation taking the strong data from each system.”

Open access 

UEL successfully went live with EFACS E/8 in March 2005 and achieving instant access to information within EFACS is just one of many benefits the company has achieved. The open access nature of the data made possible by the underlying technology of EFACS also provides visibility across the company from within other systems, meaning that information flow is not kept in disconnected islands.

And UEL has proved the success in being able to bridge the generation gap. As Bailey concludes: “Our product lines have quadrupled and our turnover has doubled – which simply could not have happened with our previous system which was struggling at its limits with only half the current turnover. We simply couldn’t have got this far without EFACS and what’s more, the system is coping very comfortably with where we are as a company so we know it will facilitate considerable further growth.”

RACAL ACOUSTICS

It’s a similar story at Racal Acoustics, a world leader in the supply of highly-engineered audio ancillaries for rugged military communication applications.

Here, however, the nature of the company’s existing systems and technology necessitated the decision to replace its disparate systems based on old technology with a fully integrated ERP system from SSL WinMan, built on the latest .NET technology.

One of Racal Acoustics primary challenges is not only being able to develop and/or supply the right equipment but to be able to do so within the very tight timescales demanded by the military. These orders may be for units measured in single figures or batches of several thousand. They may also be for existing or modified versions of the company’s thousand-strong product range or for an entirely new device.

To meet this, Racal Acoustics has developed a flexible and widely dispersed manufacturing capability which while having many advantages, opens the company up to the challenges of managing a longer supply chain and retaining visibility at every stage. A reliance on key suppliers also adds to this in terms of supplier relationship management.

Unconnected systems

To help overcome these substantial challenges, the company had relied on a complex arrangement of largely unconnected IT and paper-based systems. Nick Moore is Racal Acoustics’ Head of IT and he describes how things used to be: “Over the years we had developed a comprehensive range of solutions to tackle individual problems. Many of these, both IT and paper-based, were bespoke and lacked any serious abilities to connect or communicate with each other. In essence we ended up with lots of islands of information and despite attempts to join these up, it was largely impossible.”

Because the disparate systems were so dependant on their underlying technology base – especially the paper based ones, the only viable solution that would also deliver required efficiency gains was to replace everything with a state of the art system, based on the latest technology.

From a shortlist of over 50 vendors, Racal Acoustics chose WinMan from SSL WinMan. Moore again: “WinMan was the only solution that was built on .NET technology from the ground up. We saw a number of systems that essentially were older products with a web front end or re-coded in .NET. We were also impressed that while keen to work with the latest technology, it was tried and tested technology - for example, WinMan’s use of SQL2005 as its main database.”

Real time visibility

A successful and on-time go-live provided almost instant confirmation of the benefits anticipated during the implementation. Suddenly people had real time visibility of information and could see for themselves not just the impact their work had on the system but also the impact it had on other people’s actions and roles in the company.

For Moore, the acid test was the end of year review where no department stood up and said they had failed to meet their aims and objectives because of the system. Whilst unable to disclose specifics for reasons of competitive confidentiality, he is unequivocal in his assertion that across all key business KPIs, performance is up.

“While we know we’ve had an aggressive growth strategy and improved processes, there’s no denying we wouldn’t have seen the growth we have if it wasn’t for WinMan. We simply couldn’t have expanded with our previous systems and we know there’s a lot in reserve in WinMan to take us a long way forward in our plans,” Moore concludes.

While the generation gap most certainly exists, it can be effectively dealt with as shown by the above different but equally successful approaches. And with the inherent “future proofing” of modern ERP systems due to their underlying technology, any future generation gaps should be easier still to resolve.