Gearing up for race tactics on factory visibility

Racing car gearbox manufacturer Hewland Engineering is seeing its customer service, flexibility, efficiency and profitability improving, while work in progress (WIP) and materials stock decrease, through early use of real-time WIP tracking and shop floor data collection (SFDC), all tightly integrated with its ERP. Next step, says the firm, will be advanced planning and scheduling (APS). Hewland is a family-run business employing 160 in Maidenhead. In the last decade the business has changed substantially as it’s moved from standards to heavily bespoked race gearbox designs and engineer-to-order and stock holding services. To keep pace, the firm has spent some £9m on new work centres, processes, training and IT. A big part of the latter was a Syspro (Impact Encore) ERP system, from Information Engineering, which has been implemented and rolled out in stages since 1996. Hewland started with the financials, progressed to inventory control and SOP, then T&A and payroll, and then the bill of materials (BoM). This, says the firm, is about evolving with the IT rather than big bangs. Either way, the WIP aspects of what was IE’s Real Time Factory (now Syspro APS) are the latest, and these are making the big difference. Real time views Hewland is effectively building a complete and real-time view of supply and demand right across its business – internally and externally. Production director Dave Radley says: “For the first time, we have found ourselves able to quote accurate delivery dates with complete confidence and we have begun to schedule our work more accurately.” Before, the firm could see jobs loading onto the shop floor and coming out, with the usual job cards and Kardex systems, but with only one data collection point – at heat treatment in the middle. The rest was the classic black hole. Few knew accurate job status, even fewer where particular parts and assemblies were in the factory, or at subcontract machinists and foundries. But in racing, timing is everything, so when customers needed rush jobs, Hewland was fire-fighting to do them, with poor visibility of parts being moved between jobs and the knock-on effects of that. And that’s what the WIP system has rectified. “Now, if we do have to produce a new set of gears,” says Radley, “Syspro will allow us to implement it as a ‘revised component’ and we’ll schedule the work immediately, seeing the implications for other work in progress, and other jobs waiting to be called off. We’ll be able to cope with regular changes in the schedule without disrupting the plant.” Production manager Fred Ferguson agrees. “We’re gradually getting to see our total manufacture and stock holding, and it’s helping us achieve better delivery performance.” And he adds: “Our short-term objective is seeing where things are, without slowing them down, using data collection on the shop floor. It’s on one work centre at the moment. “We’ve already been able to reduce batch sizes and, as a result, cut our WIP, and we’re uncluttering the factory, which is also improving our throughput.” It’s a virtuous circle, and with an objective of having SFDC and WIP management right through the factory, it can only get better. “Then we’ll do the APS,” says Ferguson. It’s by no means the only IT-driven improvement. IT manager Kevin Lingard says that, for example, web technologies are being pushed. “The design director wants better online communications for the design office,” he says, the point being to move towards collaborative engineering. It’s a logical choice, and when it comes it will add to what Lingard says is already good, with links between its CoCreate CAD and Syspro. Lingard reckons that without all this, Hewland would have long since had to employ several more people to control the increasing complexity and throughput of its manufacturing. Ferguson gets the last word. “Much of the work we’ve done with the Syspro system is really about improving internal communication… It’s about building a clear and real time view of what’s going on in the plant. Production staff will be able to plan their own work, calling off a new job as they finish the previous one, via a terminal on the shopfloor… Next, with APS, we’ll be able to reduce stocks further and have a much more accurate view of finished goods, as well as improving on-time delivery and reducing work in progress.”