EFACS E/8 brings visibility and control to Gesipa Blind Rivets
Gesipa Blind Riveting Systems
Customer Profile
Gesipa Blind Riveting Systems are a leading manufacturer of cold formed, blind riveting solutions to a wide range of industries in the UK and throughout Europe.
The Challenge
The main challenges for the business has been calculating capacity against work available, whilst planning the most efficient workflow overall.
The Solution
“It was clear that the Exel team had a deep understanding of the industry and our business by the comprehensive way they explained a range of production planning techniques we could benefit from. It was also clear that EFACS could do the job.”
The Benefits
For the first time ever, Gesipa had real-time access not just to what was actually happening in every part of the production process, but also the projected flow of work into the production area.
EFACS E/8 brings visibility and control to Gesipa Blind Rivets
Gesipa Blind Riveting Systems are a leading manufacturer of cold formed, blind riveting solutions to a wide range of industries in the UK and throughout Europe. While Gesipa, based in Keighley, West Yorkshire, ‘only’ produce 2 key products – blind rivets and rivet nuts – the possible range of finishes, sizes and other configurable factors contribute to a current range of over 1500 different products. Gesipa also specialise in making products either to individual customer specification or to solution specification, including design, testing and manufacture.
With annual production levels of 300 million rivets and 60 million rivet nuts and order sizes ranging from single boxes for small distributors through to continual orders measured in millions for tier 1-3 automotive suppliers, Gesipa need exacting levels of manufacturing and stock visibility and control. When the company replaced their ageing legacy system, they put their trust in EFACS E/8 from Exel Computer Systems.
The process of blind rivet and rivet nut manufacturing is theoretically straightforward. Blind rivets comprise 2 parts, the mandrel and the eyelet, with the mandrels starting out as vast coils of steel, stainless steel or aluminium wire of different thicknesses. These are then cut to size, cold formed and heat treated before undergoing a variety of finishing processes – many of which are subcontracted out – before being finally assembled with the correct eyelet to form the finished product. Rivet nuts are made from wire and, like rivets, are cold formed but entail many more operations in their manufacturing process. Each nut has to undergo two subcontract operations which may be at different subcontractors. This not only lengthens the manufacturing process but also means that only two processes – the actual heading and later tapping – are under Gesipa’s control. Even with EFACS E/8, but much more so beforehand, the main difficulty is in calculating capacity against work available. To meet demand Gesipa have a bank of 14 eyelet machines, 7 mandrel machines, 3 rivet nut heading machines and 14 tapping machines. However with changeover times of any dies taking up to half a day, planning the most efficient workflow is one of the company’s key challenges.
With next day delivery times promised on their primary product lines, Gesipa also face the ongoing challenge of optimising stock levels in order to meet actual and not just projected demand. Gesipa overcome the physical storage issues by keeping buffer stocks at key supplier sites to ensure continuity of supply. This however is complicated further by the degree of subcontracting involved with any particular product. Keeping track of huge volumes of part finished goods physically off-site is just one logistical difficulty. Checking the accuracy of finishing and plating of goods returning from subcontractors is another. Furthermore, Gesipa have to contend with fluctuations in the supply of raw materials in terms of quality, availability and price. Some raw materials are shipped from America, which can take 3 months. Delivery dates are by definition flexible, as are the prices given the volatility of exchange rates. In an increasingly competitive global market, Gesipa have to compete against overseas competition which focuses primarily on cost as opposed to quality, while also retaining what is a highly skilled and specialised workforce.
Andrew Holmes is Gesipa’s Financial Director and he recalls how they tried to overcome these challenges prior to their investment in EFACS E/8. “We had an accounts based package called Multisoft which we used for sales processing and limited levels of stock control. However, because this didn’t integrate with the manufacturing processes we had to continually export data from Multisoft into spreadsheets to generate work to lists on a fortnightly basis. These were essentially work outlines for what had to be done, by whom, and in what order.” As Paul Taylor, Manufacturing Manager adds, “The makeshift plan was so cumbersome and complicated that it couldn’t ever be updated because it took almost 2 weeks to redo.” Taylor continues, “Take blind rivets for example. We’d have a requisition for the Mandrel, Eyelet and Assembly stage with each having its own unique information, yet all relating to a single Purchase Order. When the Mandrel or Eyelet part of the order left for subcontracting, it was all too easy to lose any sense of linking this section to the original purchase order.”
Sue Lamb, Administrator, describes the inevitable consequences, “Most of the actual tracing of orders relied on a mixture of manual experience of key personnel and physical sheets of paper manually moved from one file to another as the order progressed. We were unable to have any sense of true sequential numbering and used stock locations as a crude means of gaining visibility.” Holmes again, “If a customer enquired about the progress of an order this would quite often involve someone having to physically walk around the manufacturing site to actually find the order, estimate how far through the process it was, and then estimate how much longer it would take. If the order was at a subcontractor, we had even less visibility and control.”
The manual writing of instructions for subcontractors brought its own difficulties, specifically in the area of accuracy. As Taylor explains, “With no system in place for communicating plating and finishing specifications to subcontractors, 3 different people might write the same instructions in 3 different ways. The result was a high level of goods coming back from the subcontractors but not to the expected specifications.” While acknowledging that the way Gesipa used to work inevitably led to a high degree of late deliveries and a continual sense of fire-fighting, Holmes stresses, “What we had we used as well as we could. However we recognised we needed to do something different but also that such a change would be a serious challenge and that it would need to be handled with great care.”
The opportunity to do something different came naturally in 2005 due to the decision of the Multisoft authors to stop supporting the system. This provided a natural opportunity to look for a much more robust, modern and most importantly, manufacturing-oriented business system. To assist with this, Gesipa called on the services of trusted external IT consultant, Steve Ellis of Enigma Business Solutions. He describes the process of finding the right solution for Gesipa. “The management team at Gesipa drew up a list of requirements that the new system would have to have. At the heart of this was a combination of powerful functionality and flexibility that would closely fit the way Gesipa currently work, and which had inherent flexibility to adapt with them in the future. Longevity was important to them so a supplier with a proven history of developing manufacturing systems as well as an in-depth understanding of our business was also central.”
After a comprehensive review of suitable candidates it came to a shortlist of 2: EFACS E/8 from Exel and a modified version of a Sage product from the suppliers of the original Multisoft system. Gesipa made several reference site visits to existing customers of each contender before inviting each supplier to demonstrate the product in a context similar to Gesipa’s. EFACS E/8 proved to be the best fit in every way. Taylor comments from a manufacturing perspective, “It was clear that the Exel team had a deep understanding of the industry and our business by the comprehensive way they explained a range of production planning techniques we could benefit from. It was also clear that EFACS could do the job.” Ellis comments from a technology perspective, “With its commitment to using the latest and most future-proof technology, and a substantial user base already benefiting from this, EFACS was also the wisest investment.” Taylor adds a third reason, “The majority of our manufacturing people were completely new to MRP and we were unsure how they would respond to working with such a system. Again, the Exel team made the manufacturing team feel very much at ease and this was a major contribution to the actual success of the implementation .”
Within only 7 months of making a positive decision to invest in EFACS E/8, Gesipa were fully live on the system and experiencing the benefits. For Ellis, who led the implementation team, one of the key factors behind the short and successful go-live was the adoption of a project management approach to the implementation. “Many ERP implementations follow a prescribed model, usually defined by the software author and based on a number of assumptions about the company implementing the software. In my experience, there is simply no substitution for hands-on project management and working with the people that will ultimately use the system on a daily basis to make it a success.”
Central to this was the relationship with Taylor and the manufacturing team. Together they set about mapping out in detail what the company wanted the system to achieve and then identifying what information was required to make this happen. Much of this was new territory, especially in the area of manufacturing planning and maintaining stock control and visibility throughout the entire manufacturing process. Part Matrices, Bill of Material lists and Routing Matrices all had to be created from scratch and in a very demanding timescale.
The hands-on project management approach was also a key factor in getting the manufacturing team to not just overcome any hesitancy about using such a powerful system for the first time, but also to generate a real sense of ownership. By showing how their expert knowledge would be incorporated into the system, Ellis and Taylor soon found that the manufacturing team were making positive suggestions about more streamlined ways of working, because of the possibilities provided by EFACS E/8. Ellis is adamant about the value of this to the long term success of the implementation. “The manufacturing team have not just accepted the project, itself a major achievement, they have considerably enhanced it. They have been extremely supportive of the entire implementation because they could see for themselves how EFACS would help them do their jobs, even when it meant doing things differently.”
From the outset Gesipa had decided to adopt a ‘big bang’ approach to going live. Thanks to the hard work of all concerned the company successfully went live, on target, on May 1 st 2006. “In many ways the actual go-live was an anti-climax”, exclaims Ellis, “but this is one of the characteristics I have come to recognise of a good implementation. Everything worked as it should; the transition was so smooth that some people weren’t even aware that the new system was up and running in the background.”
The benefits of EFACS E/8 soon began to make themselves felt at Gesipa. Interestingly, Taylor notes that one of the most immediate benefits was the continued growth in the recognition by the shop floor of the value of the system and the possibilities it opened up to fine tune how work was actually done. “Much of this comes from the fact that from the outset the data in EFACS proved itself to be accurate. The manufacturing team would check and re-check the figures and each time EFACS would be right. This proven trust helped cement the high expectations of the system, especially to people who had never seen a complete Works Order before.”
The visibility of the system was also quickly recognised and appreciated. For the first time ever, Gesipa had real-time access not just to what was actually happening in every part of the production process, but also the projected flow of work into the production area. Not only could they at last keep accurate track of what products were with which subcontractor, they could also determine when these products should be despatched to the subcontractor as well as alerting when deliveries back from the subcontractor had not materialised as planned. This real-time visibility of data has, in Taylor’s words, “Allowed people to make much more intelligent decision making by immediately letting them see areas where we may potentially have a problem.”
Other benefits have come from the centralised database structure within EFACS E/8. This removes all the data entry and duplication error possibilities that Gesipa had previously struggled with as a result of so much reliance on manually written lists and hand typed spreadsheets. Ellis again, “Even just by applying basic error checking we have made it practically impossible for someone to enter data incorrectly. The joined-up nature of EFACS lets you see the impact of each order on the rest of the business which gives you greater confidence when dealing with customers and suppliers alike.”
The lack of visibility of the former system makes cost saving hard to quantify, but Gesipa have identified a reduction in Sales arrears from £ 150k per month down to under £50k per month. Holmes adds that, “Customer satisfaction levels have also risen dramatically because we are now getting the right product to the right place at the right time. While not the sole cause, this has had a direct impact on our ability to grow the business. We couldn’t have got where we are without EFACS.”
In keeping with their recognition that EFACS E/8 offers far greater possibilities than they had anticipated, Gesipa plan to carry on developing the system. Specific considerations include much greater use of Shop Floor Data Collection (SFDC) to streamline workflow and to feed real-time data back into EFACS E/8 to enable a continual monitoring of the projected plan against reality. Planning as a whole is an area Gesipa recognise they can do much more with and they are investigating extensive use of Continual Replenishment Planning (CRP) and Master Production Scheduling (MPS). Developing deeper Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is also a possibility.
In conclusion, Ellis, Holmes, Taylor and Lamb each have a slightly different view on where EFACS E/8 has been of greatest benefit to the company. What all are agreed upon is that at the heart of the company’s success with the system lies the excellence of the teamwork involved at all levels, especially the enthusiasm and positivism of the manufacturing team. Holmes concludes, “A lot of effort and hard work went into this, but EFACS is now paying this back in every aspect of the business.”
