Managing your change much better

To err is human, to forgive divine, goes the saying coined by Alexander Pope, the 18th Century poet. We might add that it seems equally human for customers to change their minds. The job then is managing consequent changes in design, supplier contributions, material requisitions and production schedules, while minimising risk, additional costs and the scope for errors. Oh, and keeping the project on track and the customer happy. Changing a drawing and ensuring the right people know about it is easy compared with the management of the rest of the change process. However, not doing so properly is the fast lane to bankruptcy. Few companies take the challenge of managing change more seriously than Sam Tooling, which has 55 employees and is based in Coleford in the Forest of Dean. Its business is divided equally between making jigs and fixtures, building special purpose machines and manufacturing precision components, including a revolutionary anti back drive coupling that the company has patented. Customers range from small firms to blue chips such as Rolls Royce and Xerox. Director Andrew Sterry says: "We have found it very difficult to make a profit in the last few years. We do not want to shrink so we have had to formulate a strategy to strengthen our position. First we are going to increase quality performance to that demanded by the latest aerospace standards. Second, we are going to improve the management of our internal activities. Third, we are going to improve our project management. Fourth, we are going to improve our sales and marketing. And fifth, we are going to adopt the Investors in People standard." The company is already IT literate, using seven seats of Autodesk AutoCAD 2D and five of Inventor 3D for design, Excel for project management and a bespoke system built on Microsoft Access for job costing and invoicing. But as Sterry says: "This does not give us a clear enough picture of scheduling or purchasing and is not linked to our Sage accounting system." The company intends to purchase a new MRP system, probably JobBoss from K3, to help, but the real challenge, according to Sterry, is the change in culture. "That is much more difficult to achieve. We are going to understand and implement the changes in management thinking first, and will then bring in the MRP system to support and reinforce them," he says. Automatic but flexible "We need to understand our strengths and weaknesses. For example, at the moment we give a GA to a toolmaker, but the job often has to be divided into tasks, and we have not been very good at putting those into a schedule. The advantage of a computer system is that when you make a change, you see the knock-on effects very easily. But we will not allow MRP to dictate what we do: we don't want to compromise flexibility." It's a common enough theme, but few are tackling the process of embracing appropriate IT solutions to improve efficiency as systematically as this company. Nor for that matter the culture change. For example, sales and marketing manager Craig Wintle is currently studying for an MBA on Communications in Change Management at the University of Gloucestershire to ensure that the company does it right. Sterry already has his MBA on Knowledge Creation. "If we do not take this seriously, we are not going to be here," he says. Sterry is pleased with some of the things already achieved with IT-backed management which, he says, have given the company confidence to go forward. He cites some of the KPIs (key performance indicators) now being tracked. When first mooted, they were thought to be a waste of time, but are now commonly accepted as essential. Sterry points to a graph showing which suppliers are most often responsible for late delivery, which has focused minds on improvement, leading to major time and cost savings on projects that would previously have been in trouble. Challenges now faced include managing changes in the design of special machine tools. "It's a help doing it in Inventor when we have to make a change," says Sterry, "because we can easily show our intentions to the customer." But the crucial issue remains being able to examine the effects of changes on cost, and putting those before the customer as quickly as possible. "Give a bracket design to a tool maker and he is liable to make it better and more expensive than it needs to be or the customer is willing to pay for," explains Sterry. "We need to ensure fit for purpose not the best we can do." Meanwhile, another company that has gone from considering how to use software for better change management to actually doing it is baggage handling systems manufacturer Logan Teleflex in Hull. In order to find the optimum solution for managing its change issues, the company worked with Imass Design Solutions based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Colin Watson, business development director at Imass, says: "Logan is fairly typical of a number of manufacturing organisations. They had two different CAD systems - Solid Edge and AutoCAD - in their two drawing offices and a separate ERP and stock control system, and they could not share information very easily." There were difficulties in transferring data between Solid Edge and AutoCAD, while BoMs (bills of materials) had to be recreated manually in order to be entered into the business system. "They reckoned they could gain efficiency by data re-use so they streamlined into one system," says Watson - 22 seats of Autodesk Inventor and 55 of Productstream linked to a new ERP system from IFS. And there's improved information flow, not least because all models are now in one format. "Part of the job we did was to convert 20,000 models done in Solid Edge to Inventor," says Watson. Now, designs produced on Inventor lead to that system generating the BoMs, which are then taken through Productstream into the ERP system. Says Watson: "Productstream takes a design as modelled, then gives it an item number. There is a template set up to generate numbers using the company's numbering convention, which then flows sequentially." But Productstream also automates release management by directly managing engineering changes along with the BoMs. As for bottom line benefits, Watson says: "It's early days, but I would expect them to see an improvement in the balance sheet. They can expect to see a 40% improvement in terms of time saved. It could be much more than that, but only if everything has been integrated properly." Before closing, while using one CAD format for design work undoubtedly helps both the inter-functional collaboration and engineering revision management processes, there is the alternative of using a generally agreed common standard. Lenton Engineering, for example, in Watford is a small subcontract engineering business with a number of blue chip customers. Proprietor Roy Hopwood says: "To be honest, most of our customers work with CAD systems but we don't." His company copes with interpreting designs produced using different CAD systems - and the inevitable changes on the way - using probably the most universal standard and simplest process available. "They all send us drawings as Adobe PDFs which we open and print out. If there are any problems, we email them back," he laughs.