The Ask:
UK-based photonic measurement equipment manufacturer – Arden Photonics – approached explic8 for guidance and expertise on the implementation of the Material Resource Planning (MRP) software ‘MRPeasy’, to transition their business away from Excel-based planning and stock control. The business already had in-place a highly effective CRM and Financial system and was looking for an intermediary platform to provide insight deeper control into their production operations.
The Challenges:
- The organisation was conducting their production planning with success utilising excel-based models
- The business had run their material requirements with a manual kanban system that required siloed knowledge to process with suppliers efficiently
- The organisation had experienced year-on-year growth, with an expanding product range leading to a growing number of parts, and controlled engineering documents for production
- The organisation did not have full visibility into shopfloor production labour utilisation
- The organisation needed a platform that could help estimate production costing, with the ability to review variance costing against actuals
The Objectives:
- Implement the cloud-based MRP system ‘MRPeasy’ with shop floor reporting and full production scheduling capabilities.
- Migrate over the controlled documents for bill of materials and routings from engineering with assurance for continued control moving forward
- Provide visibility of live stock-control, allowing the system to prompt, and guide the purchasing requirements to reduce the need for stock holding and therefore value of stock on-hand
- Provide the organisation with enriched operational data to continue to make data-driven decisions on the performance of the business
- Build digital workflows that allow data to synchronise from the CRM and into the Financial Package in use
The Approach:
- 9-week project centred around system capability, data gathering and analysis, system set-up and workflow development, through to training and Go-Live
- 83 business requirements identified for consideration with the implementation of the new ‘MRPeasy’ system, of which, 90%+ could be satisfied by the platform
- Current state processes mapped using the ‘Brown Paper’ technique, looking at the business through the lens of Forecast, Planning, Action and Reporting
- Future state processes developed with the internal team, including simulated running of the new processes in a sandbox environment
- Development of ‘MRPeasy’ internal superuser capabilities
- Go-Live planning, and monitoring of the system to develop internal problem-solving and solution creation inside ‘MRPeasy’
The Result & Benefits
- Centralised cloud-based software allowing access to production planning, inventory and procurement management
- Increase in accuracy of stock control through implementation of shop floor reporting at the point of usage
- Production planning capabilities that take into consideration material availability and production capacity
- Single-source of truth for their production BOMs and parts register managed by their internal engineering team
- Production traceability through serial number allocation to both finished goods and internal components allowing insight from purchase to shipment