RH Technical saves time, money and ink with rented ERP

Director Chris Hills says the company is also saving £20,000 due to more efficient control of inks, thanks to improved visibility of forward bookings, and that MRP, which used to take half a day to run, now takes seconds. And he adds that the rental price for the ERP system is less than the cost of maintenance alone on his previous system. The company – which manufactures plastic labels, nameplates fascias and flexible and rigid membrane switch panels assemblies, using screen print technology – moved up from an ageing AS/400 powered MRP system to 123mrp.NET last year. Hills says that what was immediately noticeable was the speed at which the new system operated. “We used to run the old system on a net change basis every night. Now we run it six or seven times a day without even thinking about it. To be able to run MRP immediately and firm up requirements is very valuable to us.” Report generation and obtaining data in general also saw a dramatic improvement; “We have various daily reports that are now automatically generated, ready at people’s desks when they start work. We don't even worry about getting data out of the system anymore – it’s just available to us. “Generating month-end statistics used to be a full day’s work just to try to get the data to make sense. Now it’s a standard report that requires very little manipulation. Overall we have halved the time we spent analysing production data. Information that was previously spread over several screens was now displayed on one within 123mrp.NET.” Beyond that, he says that routine tasks, such as purchasing, loading orders to the shop floor and despatching goods, all now take much less time, with some operations, for example, labour booking, also benefiting from barcode scanning to further reduce the possibility of data entry errors. And as for stocking and handling ink used for orders, Hills says: “This was previously particularly difficult to control, as any one ink can be made up of four or five colours, which are unique to each product. The price of the ink was roughly put into the cost of the product, but was never truly controlled. “We also did not accurately control the amount of ink being made for each job, meaning that a lot of ink was often made but never used. Now we have valid quantity per job information, along with issue and stock control over the ink.”