The power of multi-processing

If you think your product range is big, look at James Walker. The firm makes gaskets, seals and packings for a huge range of industries, and for everything from new build to MRO (maintenance repair and overhaul) globally. Not only does it have a large number of product families but immense attribute, size, material and performance ranges within each of those. What's more, they're all being developed and added to, not rationalised, all the time: that's what industrial sealing is about. "Think about steel rolling mills," explains Adrian Wakefield, business services director. "Although they all perform the same function, they have different designs, operate in different media at different temperatures, with varying operating cycles. So the range of seal types, profiles and materials in this area alone is substantial. And often, even individual steel mills' requirements vary. We have one major customer in Belgium that we've been dealing with for 35 years, yet every week we need to create new items for them." As a result, although seals are all built generically and around standard and well known production processes and technologies, the issue is managing massive and growing variety – 180,000 active SKUs and 500,000 more legacy – while providing good, accurate, fast customer service and also turning a profit. And that has several implications: like enabling identification of what's needed quickly and efficiently 24/7, providing for slick quoting, as well as making and delivering on time, in full, while keeping inventories and lead times low. It all points to making as much as possible to-order. But easier said than done. Looking at the product families and the associated manufacturing processes, there are soft cut gaskets made from compressed fibre sheets, cork bonded jointing, expanded cellular materials and rubber sheets, mostly involving cutting profile shapes. At the large end, that means manual processes, while at the high volume smaller end it's automated CNC water jet cutting or metal cutting with nesting software and a wide range of tooling, as well as impression stamping. Utilisation still counts Then there's the compression packings, multi-filament combinations of materials like glass, Kevlar and graphite fibres for applications ranging from stuffing boxes to sealing chemical tanker hatches and valve stems. And there's James Walker's core products: high tech mouldings, such as 'o' rings and rotary and hydraulic seals – all impression moulded on modern kit. "It all means trying to make efficient use of a lot of expensive capital assets," observes Wakefield. Recently, much of that drive has been through lean initiatives. "As a business, we used to think that technology – IT and new machines – could solve our problems and keep us competitive. And although that's true to a certain extent, much greater benefits are to be gained by involving our people and really examining our processes, looking at where we add value for our customers. "IT is fantastic at bridging communication gaps, eliminating manually intensive reconciliation tasks, avoiding duplication, aiding with analysis and generating exceptions and alerts. But our people have to take responsibility for what they do with the information it delivers." In other words, simply automating existing processes isn't good enough; it's much more effective to examine the processes bottom-up and top-down, ideally using techniques such a value stream mapping – then refine them and automate wherever possible. It's worth noting that on the application engineering and quoting side, for example, James Walker has to get it right first time. "Application engineering and technical vetting are significant but critical overheads for us," says Wakefield. "Our customers run very expensive assets using our seals, and its critical that we help them understand the components they need to get the best value in-service." And he makes the point that when it comes to the MRO market, customers might have the old part in front of them, a model number, drawing or microfiche. The challenge there is identification from the current range, or equivalents to legacy parts – and doing it quickly and accurately. Going demand-driven So going demand-driven end-to-end is about reviewing, improving and automating a lot of very different aspects of the business, certainly not just manufacturing. "More than 50% of our business is currently make-to-order, and I believe we can take that further with the IT we already have." So how? "Better planning and management, and better reporting of the status of processes and components in the supply chain," he insists. And what does that mean? "For us, that means, for example, investing more in shopfloor data collection [SFDC] as part of the control of what happens on the shopfloor." And he's referring to the more sophisticated end of SFDC, which tends to get lumped together as MES (manufacturing execution systems). "What we need to do is make it easier for operators at that level to use the systems – so gloved hand touch screens and the like – and to get them to take ownership of the data and what they are doing." At this important level, the problem most of us can identify with is getting operators and team leaders to buy into the importance of their own data to the business as a whole – machine rates, yields, downtimes, reasons and so on. But, of course, there's more. "Our business is very different from the classic assembly using BoMs [bills of materials] and routes, which you can perhaps think of as a pyramid," says Wakefield. "Our complexity is the spread... What's difficult for us here is, for example, to recognise detailed capacity, to plan and schedule that optimally and then react to changes and events efficiently." And then to effect continuous improvement. He gives the example of a press with a specific platen area. "On the same press we schedule a tool producing 100mm diameter products on a multi-cavity basis, or we may use an 800mm single cavity part and we might want to put five tools on at the same time. Optimising tools, sequences and platens is best done at the local level, using the skill of the teams – but the feedback on what they are doing and how it affects the plan is vital in providing up-to-date information which affects our customers – and this is where IT comes in. "We're working on describing our tooling items in the same way as our SKUs, capturing and analysing tool and product attributes," he says. The goal is the production equivalent of a product configurator, but taking into account the detail of manufacturing itself, and building on the existing quoting configurator engine. "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 halfway 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. We're currently working on delivering a link between the SKU and our tooling items, using logic that looks at materials, shrinkage rates and other variables that can be gathered from the new SKUs attributes." Shopfloor flexibility At the other end of the shopfloor, it's about operators recording actuals, events and so on, with appropriate reasons identified for downtime and the like. That means installing MES level systems so that production management, maintenance and the business as a whole can get better visibility into the real world of product and production status, while coincidentally driving maintenance priorities and identifying and prioritising improvement initiatives. Looking at production planning and scheduling itself, that's based on the Oracle e-business suite MRP and MTO (make-to-order) modules, now tightly integrated with sales orders. MRP runs for all the to-stock items, but the issues with MTO go beyond the complexities of production scheduling. Anyone making to order understands that you also have to be able to respond to late changes in some customer orders. James Walker's system has been configured such that for custom products, MRP is effectively switched off. That's eased the re-linking of specific orders to materials and production slots – but the system workflow between departments also ensures the right people are alerted to late changes and can react accordingly – even if that is by phone! It sounds good, but Wakefield concedes that there are still issues with planning and scheduling. "Oracle MTO reports when works orders and materials are launched onto the shopfloor, and the initial condition then is optimal. But this is the real world, and with such wide variety and inherent complexity, production doesn't always go exactly to plan. And since works orders are pegged to sales orders for make-to-order, people are reluctant to [interfere with the system] so we don't get the information and the feedback [to do better]." People, training, culture He doesn't see having to make significant investment in systems to get this right though. Again, it's a matter of people, training and culture. The big push from this perspective has been, and still is, in benchmarking and working with the Manufacturing Institute in Manchester – with the goal again of "getting people to take responsibility for their information." And he repeats that, once that initiative starts to bear fruit, the rest is about providing better local front ends for the operators to cement it all in. He wants encapsulated touch screens on the plant floor, with barcode systems for automation, and shopfloor drivers (like work schedules, recipes and the rest) all driven, with flexibility, through the screens – not slow paper reports. Returning to James Walker's parts and tools attributes project and its data configuration work, however, demonstrates two key points. First, business logic and pragmatism remain key, ahead of purism. Second, it's worth considering multiple uses for the same data up-front, thereby stripping out waste and error, and simultaneously enabling improvements in other parts of the business. Wakefield makes the point that with half a million SKUs, including the legacy and MRO parts, bringing all the data and rules together on a fully featured Oracle database isn't trivial. Additionally, this isn't just about production optimisation: there are other very important uses, like harnessing the information for electronic B2B working – publishing data into an accessible repository for sales and ultimately business partners, distributors and maybe bigger customers to use for semi-automated quoting and order taking. "There are always problems with projects like this," warns Wakefield. "Classifying and integrating and building validated catalogues – with a set of rules to minimise duplications and eliminate errors – is a big task. And remember, with 50 or 60 people creating the entries there's a lot of potential for error." But it's worth it, and much of that work has been done, with James Walker's sales front end now live on some of its product ranges – although still growing into others. It's already proving successful in terms of speeding the quoting and sales processes for internal sales representatives. "We used to be able to create around 300 items a week, but this system has enabled us to make huge strides. We can now create up to 2,000 new SKUs per day, without duplication or error. We're light years ahead of where we were." Slick MRO business And on the MRO side of the business in particular, where there are typically few standards and more specials, being able to be that slick in quoting and following through with make-to-order, will mean huge competitive advantage in a very valuable part of the firm's business. This is, however, not for the feint hearted. Wakefield's advice: "Think carefully about the range of opportunities." But if, or more likely when, you go there, the rewards can be very great. "We're building that part of the system out over the web to some partners and trusted third parties. So if our sister company in New Zealand goes onto the system, it can configure a seal for a job and load that as a quoted order directly onto our Oracle ERP system without intervention. "If it's a new part, or they can't find quite what they want, rather than making educated guesses [out of UK hours], the system will allow them to create their part, populate the database and make that available for everyone else." Sounds impressive? It is, and Wakefield estimates it will bring in an additional three quarters of a percent of global market in the high value, high speed MRO market. And at the cost and customer service ends of the equation, it will also deliver – by enabling both through cost-efficient make-to-order and joined-up responsiveness respectively.