Customer
Managing Director Joe Giammasi formed R & G Precision in 1974, starting his business in a small workshop on a Northamptonshire airfield.  Today, the company occupies a factory in Rushden and has gone from strength to strength by employing skilled engineers and producing high quality precision parts, working to demanding tolerances. Constant investment is made in state-of-the-art plant and measuring equipment, giving R & G an ability to provide a "one-stop shop," which has greatly benefited their customers.
The company makes components for a wide range of industries, including aerospace, medical and telecommunications. Joe's son-in-law Enzo Chiarelli, who joined the family firm 11 years ago as Sales Director, added autosport to the range of industries covered in their customer base.

Requirement
This brought with it an overriding need to deal with short leadtimes and on-time delivery.  As part of their continuous improvement programme, Enzo and the R & G management team put in place a production control system to help them deal with these demands, but found the system they chose was unwieldy and did not give them the visibility and management information they needed.

Solution
Jobshop Manufacturing Control System

Supplier
Huckerby Royall Systems Ltd
www.huckerbyroyall.co.uk

Anticipated benefits
Enzo heard about the success that Formula 1 race teams and their suppliers were achieving with the Jobshop Manufacturing Control System.  Jobshop's powerful integral scheduler improves shop floor throughput, and gives complete visibility of work in progress, as well as gaining control over material procurement.  After seeing a presentation of Jobshop, which covered all aspects of manufacturing management, from estimating through to invoicing and including scheduling, material control, costing and barcoded data collection, Joe and Enzo made the decision to move on to Jobshop.

Comment
Although R & G Precision are in the early stages of implementing Jobshop, they are already seeing substantial benefits.  Enzo says: "Since the system has been put in place, it has given us greater confidence in meeting our customers' demands and it is so much simpler to use than our previous system. We are now in a far better position to provide excellent customer service."

Customer
The Magal Engineering Group of SMEs is the product of a management buyout (MBO) from parent company Dura in 2000. Comprising four UK-based subsidiaries, it supplies a range of parts to the automotive industry.
Its subsidiaries are steel steering rack producer Adwest Engineering and Western Thomson Controls, producing thermostats both based in Reading; Adwest Cables in Stourport; and car jack producer Metallifacture of Nottingham, which also has a design and test centre in Stourport. Two further French-based engineering & production facilities, and one in India, complete the portfolio.

Requirement
In the early stages of the MBO, Magal's directors realised they needed to source an uncomplicated, lean-based business software solution that also offered overall flexibility, affordability, order traceability, and manufacturing-focussed functionality. "For our new enterprise, we recognized that we needed to find a new computer system quickly," Kevin Lowen, Magal's CFO explained. "Having become a little wary of business software systems in the wake of Y2K, and the long pilot programmes that some solutions providers recommend, we sought a system that could be implemented efficiently and quickly, was affordable and that was not overly complex. We were not going to be a Class A MRP user and had no intention of rocking the world with all manner of sophistication. We knew we were lean and mean in terms of manufacturing philosophy." 

Solution
WinMan

Supplier
SSL WinMan
www.winman.co.uk

Benefits
In Lowen's view, what particularly drew the company to SSL WinMan was not only that it offered a system that could provide all the core functionality Magal needed in a Windows environment, it also offered virtual KanBan. "We wanted to use the product as a tool to help us in our KanBan drive to reduce stocks," he said. Dave Downing, Logistics Manager at Western Thomson, added that since WinMan went live Western had already saved around £1 million in inventory from improvements in business processes, which are now complemented by the functionality of WinMan.
The KanBan element within WinMan is focussed on the supply chain, ensuring suppliers are kept clearly informed as to materials and parts required by Magal's subsidiaries on a daily or weekly basis. On the shop floor, each subsidiary uses a manual KanBan process. Magal doesn't involve WinMan in shop floor matters, preferring instead simply to feed materials/parts at one end of the factory and back flush at the other.
Downing added: "We have manual KanBan and a defined number of batches for each OEM customer. Because we're speaking to our customers every day we have a good idea as to where we can adjust production levels, and this is all we need to base our schedules on. Our suppliers are on WinMan's supply chain KanBan list, so they receive a weekly fax to tell them the quantities we want week by week. WinMan is invaluable in producing works orders and tracking them efficiently. And between these processes, WinMan helps us to control our Work in Progress (WIP) in a more lean, effective way.
WinMan also offers the functionality for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) between OEM customers and the SME supplier. "EDI is something we hope to get up and running as soon as possible, indeed we have already begun the process," said Blackburn. "By being able to manage thousands of order lines through EDI, and also control drawing and photo sharing etc with our customers, will give us a further edge in the marketplace." Blackburn added that the company will also utilise WinMan's vendor bar-coding and e-commerce/Internet functionality in the near future.

Comment
As a final word, Lowen stressed that WinMan is an "unforgiving" system in a positive and process enhancing sense. "It can come as a shock to the system when you first go live with WinMan, it does not allow us to bend the rules and enter stock that we don't yet hold for example. However, the functionality, ease of deployment, and short learning curve for end users has proved WinMan to be an ideal system allowing us to go live with our four UK companies inside 12 months."
Lowen spoke of why Magal was so impressed with SSL as a solutions provider: "SSL staff have the required expertise in dealing with lean issues. They understand our business process and are fully conversant in the discipline of manufacturing. We had a need, they understood it, and supplied a solution and an advice/support package that fitted our requirements."

Customer
Rugged Display Products supplies a range of  mobile healthcare and industrial IT solutions to customers including NHS trusts - which use its equipment in operating theatres - and Hurel-Hispano, world leading producer of nacelle / thrust reverser systems, aerostructures and jet engine composite parts.

Requirement
Rapid growth in 2003 prompted the company to upgrade its IT systems to cope with expansion. It ran an existing manufacturing system, as well as its own bespoke package, but these had become too demanding to maintain. They needed a comprehensive ERP system that could be installed and maintained in-house and offered flexibility for the future.

Solution
Caliach Vision

Supplier
Caliach
www.caliach.com

Benefits
Rugged Display Products installed Caliach Vision itself in just one week, with no additional consultancy and ran it alongside its existing systems for two weeks until it was clear that everything was operating smoothly.
"With business going so well, we cannot afford to be let down by our systems. We are able to run Caliach Vision ourselves, because it has a useful help menu which tells you what to do, while Caliach give a lot of advice over the phone if you need it," commented RDP's Duncan McKenzie.

Comment
"We looked at several ERP packages before downloading the fully functional demonstration version of Caliach Vision from their web site. It's very reasonable for a company to allow a fully functioning version to be downloaded and makes it very easy to evaluate.
Caliach Vision has proved to be excellent and does everything we want it to do," concludes McKenzie. "It is very intuitive to use, provides good value for money and gives us a lot of room for future expansion."