Stock down 30% and headcount cut by 10%

"Since first implementing Evolution, we’ve cut stocks by 30% and reduced headcount by 10%,” says Jeffrey Clarke, finance director for pressure switch maker Delta Controls. “It’s not all down to the software, but it’s been a necessary foundation,” he adds. “It’s given us better visibility throughout the business. For example, inspection used to be a wicket keeper. We manually checked that orders were put on the system correctly. Then repeated this process later on. We were nervous and didn’t feel confident about clients’ special configuration issues.” The firm makes a range of process control instrumentation, such as pressure and temperature switches, flowmeters and programmable panel indicators. It’s based in Surrey and has 60 employees with an annual turnover of £4 million, 50% of this revenue coming from exports. Clarke: “Our biggest problems stem from the fact that we have a large number of sales variants. Many orders are unique and so there’s little potential for batch manufacturing down on the shop floor. We receive around 60 orders per week, about half of these require engineering input and BOM [bill of material] creation.” Why? “We’re not talking about simple switches here. Our products carry an average price of £300 per switch. Our catalogue is now at 60 pages and there are roughly 11 million different combinations a client can choose. Controlling that is crucial to our success.” As far as IT systems are concerned, Clarke says the company started to run into problems back in 1990. “We had several business systems back then. We keyed in orders to an old ICL system that passed details over to PCs. It was too specialised and knowledge was trapped in people’s heads. We needed one business system that could handle the majority of what we were doing on a daily basis, but which was also flexible.” He says there was little discipline on part structure, lots of firefighting, too much obsolescence, pricing errors and far too much time wasted on correcting internal errors. “Three sales engineers would often come up with three different switch arrangements for a client and therefore three different prices.” In 1991, the company decided it needed to formulate some kind of IT strategy before purchasing new software. Clarke: “We created requirements lists from each department and then established a shortlist of open platform software suppliers… We chose Evolution’s [called MTMS back then] software for its coverage of disciplines and its flexibility.” Transformed communications Delta implemented Evolution’s sales order processing, stock control, financials, MRP (material requirements planning), work in progress control and costing modules on time and within budget in 1992. “We’ve had 10 years of usage covering all aspects of our business,” says Clarke. “Clear information is always available to the users when they need it. Communication between departments improved significantly. We’ve also been able to integrate other systems into Evolution over the years, feeding current information both ways.” And it hasn’t stopped there. As well as savings from stock and headcount reductions, the implementation is now leading to other important benefits. “We’ve started to look outside our own four walls. In the past, we found our products used to be purchased by engineers and price was less of a consideration. But it’s changed now. The trend is moving away from engineering specifications towards commercial purchases. The buyer wants to treat our products like commodities; quality is assumed, and so our sales staff need to be professional salesmen, not engineers,” he says. By March next year, the firm aims to go live internally with Fourth Shift’s Enable software running on an intranet. This will include a product sales configurator. “There are 11 rules or questions clients have to answer in order for our sales engineers to configure the correct switch. These have to be in the correct order for the customer. What we want internally is not always what the client needs to be presented with. That’s been one of the most difficult things to agree on.”