- Hugely speeded up quoting and sales processes
- No dupes or errors
- Huge advantage in growing, lucrative MRO business
- 24 x 7 global business support
- Cost-efficient, responsive make-to-order business
Seal of success for James Walker
1 min read
James Walker manufactures a massive range of gaskets, seals and packings for a wide range of industries, and for everything from new build to MRO (maintenance repair and overhaul) applications. The firm has a large number of product families and immense attribute, size, material and performance ranges within each: what's more, they're being added to all the time.
As a result, the issue is managing massive and growing variety while providing fast, accurate customer service – including making and delivering on time, but also quoting accurately and fast. "Our customers run very expensive assets using our seals, and its critical that we help them understand the components they need to get best value," says Adrian Wakefield, business services director.
Its solutions: "Better planning and management, and better reporting of the status of processes and components in the supply chain... Our complexity is the spread: what's difficult for us is to recognise detailed capacity, to plan and schedule that optimally and then react to changes and events efficiently. Optimising tools, sequences and platens is best done at the local level, but feedback is vital. We're working on describing our tooling items in the same way as our SKUs – capturing and analysing tool and product attributes."
It's an advanced sales configurator: "A big part of the business-winning process is about, do we already have a tool that can produce that item? If we do, we're half way to getting an order. Our quoting tools allow us to search for and select items in a structured manner, and because we've described the item in a standard sequence we can create it and price it, even if we haven't made one quite like it before."
Wakefield makes the point that with half a million SKUs, bringing all the data and rules together on a fully featured Oracle database isn't trivial. But it's worth it, because it's not just about sales and production optimisation: James Walker is harnessing the project for electronic supply chain working – publishing data into an accessible repository for sales, distributors and potentially also bigger customers.
James Walker's sales front end is now live on some product ranges, and it's already proving successful in terms of speeding quoting and sales. And on the MRO side of the business, where there are more specials, being slick in quoting, and make-to-order, will mean huge competitive advantage.
Key benefits
