Keeping stock
March 1st 2009 Materials Resource Planning has enabled Patton Joinery to
see a number of business benefits
Patton Joinery, based in Ballymena,
Northern Ireland is part of the Patton
Group, and makes a wide range of
bespoke joinery products. Its production
control previously consisted of a series of
Excel spreadsheets and Access databases
across several departments. This led to staff
having to manually duplicate data,
significant stock errors which could lead to
shortages and delays and limited visibility
across the business. Barry Johnston, work
study administrator commented; "If we
needed to do a breakdown costing for a large
job we had to go to various different sources
to get the information. Everybody had their
own separate spreadsheets and databases. It
just got too big; too messy. If someone wasn't
available who had that information you had
to wait until they got back to the office to get
it. There was duplication all the time
between the buyer, myself
doing the costings and also on
the estimating – we had the
same information held
separately and when we used
to combine it all at the end
we would get the wrong
picture completely."
At the end of 2007 the
company decided to
investigate MRP solutions and
looked at several, costing up to
£42,000. It came across 123mrp.NET and
was invited to attend an Evaluation
Workshop in January 2008 by local
distributor QM Systems at the Northern
Regional College (NRC) in Ballymena.
Interestingly, during the evaluation of
123mrp.NET Patton Joinery provided one of
its Excel spreadsheets to allow for a
demonstration of how pricing calculations
would work. Issues were identified with the
Excel files that could be resolved, enhanced
and automated by moving to 123mrp.NET,
which demonstrated further to them the
importance of migrating away from
manually manipulated data.
Patton Joinery had numerous questions as
to how 123mrp.NET could meet its needs;
"We only make one off bespoke items and
we were initially concerned whether the
system was suitable for that as many systems
seemed to be geared up for mass
production."After attending the first
workshop and being impressed other staff
were sent to two further workshops to gauge
their impressions and the decision was made
in February to select 123mrp.NET. "When
you attend a workshop you can just see how
the product works – you get the full picture."
Training was arranged in February on the
understanding that if Patton Joinery chose
not to register to receive the software that
they could walk away without further
commitment. Two staff attended the three
day user training, with Barry himself
attending the one day administration and
one day implementation courses. Further inhouse
training was performed using the
training documentation provided with
123mrp.NET.
Once training had been completed Patton
Joinery set up regular meetings with key staff
to structure and monitor the
implementation process. It signed up for
three licenses of the software, which has
since been expanded to four, and started
implementing in April. At the end of May
they went live across its purchasing and
costing department, with estimating and
stores following shortly afterwards.
After go-live the most noticeable benefit
was the reduction of paper, starting with the
purchasing department; "With purchase
orders we used to print every one, but that
has been completely cut out now.We used to
produce upwards of 600 per month but now
they are simply put on our intranet and
emailed." This has also filtered through to the
company's ISO9001 and ISO14001 quality
standards tracking, which is now completely
electronic rather than paper-based.
Further benefits were noted once
123mrp.NET was rolled out through the stores
department. Stockholding was reduced by
30%. The number of errors in stock was also
halved, with Barry noting that duplication was
the biggest cause of errors previously.
Reporting and overall business visibility
has improved considerably; "Our old systems
were not capable of the reporting that
123mrp.NET has, so it is difficult to have
figures to compare to, but visibly we can see
that the amount of paperwork and stock
levels have improved. You can just see
everything at a glance – nobody has to run
down to stores and say 'how much of this do
we have in stock'. Reporting has changed a
lot.We would produce our monthly
summaries spending a lot of time looking
through sheets and sheets of data whereas
now it's available with a few clicks of a
mouse."
Local Distribution in Ireland/Northern
Ireland QM Systems: | 
