Fast-track to success?

Steel door maker IR Martin Roberts has managed to cut lead times from eight weeks down to two, using an automated, macro-based sales order processing system for its clients, called Fast-Track. And it hasn’t taken a whole load of time and money to get it all working. The firm’s operations director Chris Hornsey says: “We’ve managed to up our sales turnover by 50% year-on-year over the last two years since the system went live.” Based in Sittingbourne, Kent, the company has 75 employees and turned over £6m of business last year. The factory has CNC machining facilities for sheet metal cutting and punching and churns out more than 10,000 door sets every year. Manufacturing is a mixture of very specific make-to-order doors, plus some standards that require a bit of customisation (special ironmongery, bracketry) before despatch. And door sets can be quite complex. Clients ask for special, added features like fire sealings, acoustic ratings, special brackets, ironmongery, size and performance characteristics, and special colour or paint. The decision to buy new software all started with a ‘value engineering’ project, undertaken jointly last year by Martin Roberts and its parent company, Ingersoll Rand. This looked at every detail and process involved in making a door, from incoming orders (telephone, fax and email) through to design, manufacturing and despatch. The results weren’t great. Of the eight weeks on average it was taking to make and despatch a door set, six were spent on paperwork alone. “We identified six projects in all, geared towards addressing the issues of cutting delivery dates, cost of sales and admin time,” says Hornsey. “We looked at three software vendors: PTC, Radan and SDRC... We chose Radan as they understood sheet metalworking and the software had special templates for our industry.” Operational since February 2000, the new system is much more than just a computer-based sales ordering system. The core of it, the special macro, was developed over a six-month period using the combined expertise of Martin Roberts’ development engineer, Glyn Hall-Edwards, who knew the firm’s design and manufacturing processes, and an application consultant from Radan Computational, who had the necessary programming skills to develop the macro. “It was down to me to define everything the macro required,” says Hall-Edwards. “We went through every detail of manufacture so that the macro has all the data needed to turn an order into a production programme.” Ordering a door set using the new Fast-track service starts with a simple order form (created in MS Excel) that’s basically a matrix of all the possible configurations of door sizes, frame profile and hardware requirements. By checking boxes the client can define doors precisely using less than 14 characters. When this form is received (by faxback or email) at Martin Roberts, the matrix data is transferred into the Radan macro to create a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet forms the basis for all the instructions required to process and manufacture that order. The instructions and data, which can fill up to 20 pages in some cases, includes a full bill of material (BOM), raw material, paint and packaging data. 24 hour deliveries The next step is the macro data being transferred to the firm’s CAD/CAM system (also from Radan). This software then automatically creates the CNC programmes required for sheet metal punching. Hornsey: “The system’s working so well now, we delivered one customer order in less than 24 hours. We were cutting metal four hours after taking the order. “We spent roughly £100k on software, consultancy, our own man full time for six months and some training for seven users,” he adds. “Payback has come in less than two years. Best of all, our main competitor has now started to buy doors from us. He just can’t match us on lead times!”