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, and one of only two in the world manufacturing race gearboxes for sports cars – rallying, touring and single-seater, including US Cart, Formula Ford and Formula One. In the last decade the business has changed substantially, as it’s moved with the industry from standards to heavily bespoked gearbox designs and engineer-to-order and stock holding services. And to keep pace, the firm has invested around £9 million on new work centres, processes, training and IT systems to make it all happen. A big part of the latter was a Syspro (formerly Impact Encore) ERP system, from software vendor Information Engineering, which has been being implemented and rolled out in stages since back in 1996. Hewland started with the financials, progressed to inventory control and SOP, then T&A and payroll, and then the bill of materials (BoM) module. This, says the firm, is about evolving with the IT rather than big bangs. Either way, the WIP aspects of what was Information Engineering’s Real Time Factory (now Syspro APS) are the latest, and these are wreaking the current transformation. The benefits come from one key fact: Hewland is now 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 knock-on effects on the rest of production, or of the consequences of parts being moved between jobs for expediency. As Radley explains: “The demands on our business can fluctuate dramatically through factors we can’t control. For instance, if a car’s engine is not revving as expected during testing, we have to supply a new set of gears at short notice.” Equally, in today’s tough times, sponsorship can unexpectedly dry up, causing an entire series to be cancelled, or a new series can start just as suddenly. To be responsive yet efficient in this industry you need visibility. And that’s what the WIP system has provided. “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 will 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 entire plant.” Production manager Fred Ferguson confirms the change. “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 automatic data collection on the shop floor. It’s on one work centre at the moment and we’re beginning to rely on it. “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 efficiency and throughput.” It’s a virtuous circle, and with a longer term objective of having SFDC and WIP management right through the factory, it can only get better. “Then we’ll do the full APS,” says Ferguson. It’s by no means the only IT development driving improvement at Hewland. IT manager Kevin Lingard says that, for example, web technologies are also being pushed. “The design director wants better online communications for the design office,” he says, the point being a move towards more collaborative engineering. It’s a logical choice, and when it comes it will add to what Lingard says is already a good system, with great links between its CoCreate CAD and Syspro. “The BoMs, for example, are the same between engineering and manufacturing,” he says. “They all come from the same Access database source.” 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. “We haven’t had to take on any extra people at all,” he says. 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, and well as improving on-time delivery and reducing work in progress.”