Joined up systems help winning intiatives fly

Continuous improvement is a way of life at Dunlop Aerospace Fluid Dynamics, saving the firm around £160,000 last year in direct costs alone. That's through lean and Six Sigma work, production tracking, engineering configuration and supply chain projects – with the firm's ERP system as the integrated hub tying it all together. The company serves the aerospace engine market, and the Coventry site makes solenoid-controlled bleed valves and equipment for customers like Rolls-Royce, GE, Pratt & Whitney and Snecma. Kevin Donnelly, supply chain manager, says there are 12,000 line items – and all of the usual issues around managing and tracking a mix of production, as well as test, aerospace standards certification, packaging and the supply chain. "90% of our turnover is from 30 or 40 product lines for the aerospace engine OEMs," he says, "but our responsibility for spares and ongoing development and specials keeps us busy." As does the pressure to keep cutting costs and lead times to remain competitive. And hence the emphasis on continuous improvement. ERP is Exel's Efacs, and it has absolutely been part of this. For example, Coventry uses efacs' configurator, both to drive validated manufacturing orders for its older designs and to ensure that, on new build, only current versions can be selected. Donnelly points out that the configurator not only reduces engineering effort, but takes risk out of the equation. An early good decision was virtually no bespoke code in the core system, the company instead tailoring its business processes to a large extent around efacs. Paul Hutchings, applications engineer, says that has made subsequent upgrades far easier than it otherwise might have been. He also says that, with efacs' then basis in Microsoft, add-ons like reports on Crystal, and applications to support the lean factory programmes, were also easy – using Visual Basic and Access. Most recently, when the firm needed to move up a level in terms of server capacity, user numbers and more modern technology, it used its continuous improvement methodologies on the system too. Says Hutchings: "We got the shell of the new system [efacs v8.21] into the test area and got the users to look at it and see how many of our bespoke applications they still needed in view of the functionality now in efacs." It was a useful audit. "In fact we needed very little." Shopfloor improvement DAFD also took the opportunity to beef up the power of its shopfloor terminals. Hutchings: "We used to have dumb terminals for efacs: now we've got PCs and printers, and we're running additional applications." The list is long: WIP management and tracking, statistical process control reports, corrective actions forms and reports and tools management all run on the shopfloor PCs – the latter with vendor-managed inventory (VMI) which alone has hugely cut costs and improved usage. Moving on to replenishment, the site now runs kanbans (via email and fax) for most materials, an initiative that resulted in raw materials inventory halved in just 18 months. Meanwhile, higher value and longer lead-time components are managed through efacs MPS and MRP for purchase schedules, while the system also populates an Access database for suppliers to see longer range requirements. DAFD is also looking at a web-based supply chain system to take that further by giving suppliers visibility of near term change – and sharing the cost savings. "There will be benefit in doing this," says Donnelly. "Even our small suppliers have the Internet and email, and they're crying out for visibility." Meanwhile, on the customer side DAFD has long term visibility of order requirements from its OEMs' web systems, which show schedules and exception reports. Currently, cell leaders re-key changes weekly into efacs' for the MRP explosion to drive purchasing and factory loading, but that too will change. "We've got plans to integrate that with efacs," says Hutchings, "using XML to directly populate our schedules."