Working smarter with customers and suppliers

Churchill China, the £50 million turnover ceramics manufacturer and distributor, is transforming itself on the web, not only with customer e-commerce, but also supply chain management. And it’s doing so within the confines of a secure, consolidated IBM iSeries (AS/400) that, with add-on middleware, is enabling ‘right first time’, XML-based interaction with distributors and customers. This is where 200-year old craft and modern IT meet. More than 1,000 craftsmen work in Churchill’s four Stoke-on-Trent factories, producing one million units a week for catering and retail. The company produces china for names like Jeff Banks’ Ports of Call, Warner Brothers’ Harry Potter, Looney Tunes’ Tom and Jerry, as well as the Queen’s Golden Jubilee gilded teapots, mugs and plaques. There are two key parts to the business. One is ‘Churchill Dining Out’ for the catering trade (hotels and restaurants); the other ‘Churchill Dining In’ for retail. The former involves selling through distributors and making to stock to achieve service levels. On retail, however, sales are to the likes of Argos, Tesco, Sainsburys, and it’s make-to-forecast cum make-to-order with the usual short lead time call-offs. The company also imports product from the Far East, eastern Europe and Columbia, and has to manage that supplier network. Externalising the business For business IT, it has Accord sales order processing (SOP), Coda financials, WMS400 for distribution and a mix of applications for export documentation, payroll and HR. Operationally, for design there’s specialist Adobe CAD for ceramics, while for manufacturing and supplier management there’s forecasting and planning now on a Prescient (formerly Proasis) packaged system and some SFDC (shopfloor data capture) implemented mainly for the decorating processes – recording number, quality inspection and operations. There’s no MRP. Churchill needed an extranet for its catering side and to manage its supplier network, allowing for everything from online product and account enquiries and order placing to triggering deliveries, order tracking, invoicing and the rest. Says IT director David Garnett: “Many of our customers told us they would be trading exclusively online, so we had to have a robust and scaleable e-commerce and supply chain system.” There were two key issues. First, most distributors and suppliers are small and/or risk averse – familiar with faxing, but little more. So PC browser and an Internet connection was the most the firm could assume. Second, like many SMEs Churchill runs with a small IT department with a full workload, making it difficult to support new technologies. First things first, and it was clear that the firm would need to offer flexibility. Larger distributors and suppliers were already using EDI, but the next level down would need to be XML with the potential for document exchange for orders and invoices, etc, followed by provision for flat CSV file interchange, even with re-keying as a minimum. As for the platform, Garnett says his team had been developing a web system with Java and IBM Websphere – “but it didn’t fit with our skill sets”. The main systems were all AS/400, so when he discovered Wizz400 middleware last year with native RPG-based functionality (including publishing live data online straight from the corporate systems), there was no contest. It meant enabling Churchill to display accurate stock and account information on the web, and to pump correct order data from the web into SOP, all in AS/400-speak. Says Garnett, “The key factor in e-business is accuracy: with this system we get orders right every time.” And he adds, “We’d been an AS/400 user for 10 years. Anybody who’s had one wouldn’t change: for us, the room is locked, the lights are out and I can’t remember the last time we had downtime.” In fact, he’s also using iSeries LPAR (logical partitioning) to consolidate compute power and simplify the infrastructure. Now, web server, corporate systems and what was a Domino Lotus Notes server are all on a single 820. Everything seems to have gone to plan. Garnett: “It has improved service and saved time and resources. Our productivity has improved and the system ensures 24-hour despatch on transactions. It’s also given us the flexibility to adapt our systems to market conditions: we can easily adapt it to support a number of different languages [which] will be a major advantage.”