Dramatic increases in growth and visibility with EFACS for Bankside Patterson

Bankside Patterson

Customer Profile

Bankside Patterson has a 40 year pedigree based on reliability, dependability and innovation. They now operate from a 12 acre factory complex in East Yorkshire.

The Challenge

“We were using an accounts package to run a manufacturing company at the same time as undergoing considerable sustained growth.”

The Solution

Bankside Patterson were looking for more than just a system – they were looking for a long term relationship with a proven company.

The Benefits

EFACS has given Bankside Patterson the capability to undertake more business and operate more efficiently for future success.

Dramatic increases in growth and visibility with EFACS

Bankside Patterson is the market leading manufacturer and supplier of chassis and modular steel frames to the holiday home, leisure and modular building industries. With a 40 year pedigree based on reliability, dependability and innovation, the 120 workforce strong company has experienced dramatic growth in recent years and now operates from a 12 acre factory complex in East Yorkshire. Turnover has more than doubled in the past year from £8m to £ 17m and further growth is anticipated. Business growth is invariably accompanied by growing pains and with such aggressive growth came significant business challenges that the company needed to overcome in order to continue its spectacular success. With one eye to the present and one to the future, Bankside Patterson invested in EFACS from Exel Computer Systems as the ideal platform to build upon.

Manufacturing at Bankside Patterson takes place on a large scale. The company produces around 100 modular building frames and 300 chassis per week which range from 4 to 17 metres in length. Orders range from £600 for a single small chassis up to £10,000 for the larger units with multiple orders at times reaching £600,000. Excluding these large orders which may have rolling call offs over an extended time period the company aims to work on a 3 week turnaround basis although thanks to its new EFACS Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, it can supply quicker than this when required.

The actual manufacturing process appears relatively straight forward involving 3 clearly defined stages of engineering, sub-assembly and final assembly. However as Sales Director Neil Taylor explains, the truth is anything but simple.

“Whilst we operate a standard range of products these can be configured and customised quite extensively so in effect each order is bespoke. This can often involve amendments to supplied design drawings which must be validated in terms of structural integrity. We also manufacture the vast majority, over 80%, of all our own components on-site and operate on a Make to Order (MTO) basis. Depending on the type of component produced and its intended use, a multitude of sequence dependent manufacturing processes can be involved, including sub-contracting to an external galvanising company. In fact, different products can have different elements of galvanising applied at different stages – all of which need to be factored into the production timeline.”

Notwithstanding the massive business growth and a recent move to its current location, the challenges that Bankside Patterson faces are many and varied. The sheer potential variety of designs creates a major scheduling issue because all orders are backwards scheduled from due date and different orders can have vastly different amounts of sequence dependent manufacturing and assembly steps. The company tries to maximise its use of raw materials and minimise waste which means using potential blank areas from the cutting process to make smaller components such as brackets etc. As Information Systems Manager Nick Hardisty comments, “Prior to EFACS, visibility of MTO components stock could remain unidentified for a period of time.”

This potential lack of visibility created a number of related difficulties. Given the physical size of the site, it is easy for materials to be misplaced or not be in the right place at the right time. Consequently production workers would potentially use materials not allocated to the current project. This led to distrust in the overall stock levels and planning process with production managers increasingly competing in order to get their orders completed. As Taylor candidly reflects, “There was a huge amount of energy within the company being spent fire fighting in order to keep the workflow smooth.”

At the time Bankside Patterson was using an ageing business management system called Pegasus Opera combined with a growing assortment of spreadsheets and manual processes to achieve this. Managing Director Chris Adams doesn’t mince his words in describing why this was less than ideal. “We were using an accounts package to try and run a manufacturing company. Not only that we were a manufacturing company that was undergoing considerable sustained growth and also changing the very way we did business.” Taylor continues, “Up until recently we had been much more focussed on the assembly and sub-assembly side of the business but we were increasingly realising that what our customers wanted was quality and variety of design. We recognised that the only way to ensure consistent quality of design and manufacture in order to deliver the kind of industry leading products and warranties required by our customers was to do much of the manufacturing ourselves.”

The inherent weaknesses in the system became ever more apparent as the business continued to grow, as did the manual workarounds used to shore up the system. At the heart of this lay the fact that critical areas of expert knowledge required to run the company efficiently and effectively were distributed in islands throughout the company and these islands were disconnected. This wasn’t just on a system level as Hardisty explains. “When the company was smaller, everyone had an overview of what everyone else was doing and so a lot of implicit assumptions were in operation in order to get the job done correctly. As the business grew, it became impossible for people to keep track of all this information and these assumptions began to fail. What we needed was to be able to collect all this invaluable expertise and somehow systematise it so that it could be distributed throughout the company.”

It became increasingly clear that a change was required and several factors combined to begin this process. First, the company was informed that its current version of Opera would no longer be supported. Secondly, the company was planning an imminent site move which would thirdly allow much more on-site manufacturing that Opera simply could not begin to manage. Hence in early 2005, the beginning of a very thorough selection process began at which time the company approached Nick Hardisty to come and oversee the process.

From the outset this was a team approach with input from key stakeholders within the company including the Managing Director Chris Adams. “I read a number of very positive articles and case studies in the Manufacturer magazine which began to inform me of what was possible for us as a company. I shared this with Nick who in addition to reading a range of articles and visiting numerous websites, began to visit a variety of manufacturing IT shows to find out what systems were out there.” Hardisty picks up the story. “It was essential we specified exactly what we needed so from the outset we consulted with representatives within the company from every business area to establish how each area currently worked. We also knew that we were looking for more than just a system – we were looking to build a long term relationship with a company that would provide the best levels of support, industry insight and compatibility.”

After an initial comparison with a variety of systems and vendors, 8 solutions were initially identified as potential candidates. Each vendor was then approached to demonstrate what the system could do and what it could do for Bankside Patterson with its own business processes. This led to a shortlist of 3 which then received much greater interrogation including site visits involving key personnel from Bankside Patterson and inviting the vendors to come and explain to each area within the company how the solution would work. Taylor explains why, “We wanted everyone who would use the system to have a clear idea of what they would be getting and how it would work as they would be helping make the final decision.” Hardisty continues, “We also visited the vendor’s Head Office because we wanted to review key members of personnel and company structure from the senior management to the support staff. We analysed the amount and turnaround time as well as the nature of support calls each vendor took and talked to development teams about the future direction of the product.”

In February 2007 it was unanimously agreed to invest in EFACS from Exel Computer Systems. As Taylor says, “While unanimous, the strength of the decision lay in the fact that different people changed their minds over time based on the in-depth nature of the evaluation process. Because of this, we had maximum confidence that we’d picked not just the best solution but also the right company for us to work with.”

The company’s implementation process was just as thorough and began with drawing up a detailed project plan to ensure that everything that was required would be covered by the EFACS system. To assist in the ongoing training, a test server was set up in March 2007 with a 3 month period set aside for any potential user of the system to actively test the system, assess its effectiveness and feed back any areas that needed refining or customising in order to work at an optimum level.

In terms of configuring and populating the system with data, Hardsity had to undertake a sizeable data cleansing and validation exercise to make use of the data from Opera. “Not only did we have a large amount of repetitive data, we had stock and general anomolies – all of which had to be manually checked and amended.” The company also had very flat level Bills of Materials (BoM), all of which had to be updated into multi-level BoMs, which required additional dedicated design resources.

With a scheduled go-live date of 1st September to coincide with the company’s new financial year, the final stage of testing involved ensuring each individual functionality area of the system linked up correctly with all other areas. Different ‘what-if’ scenarios were devised and tested with the system results compared to the projected actual results. A transfer of all live dynamic data occurred the weekend directly before the go-live and on 1st September 2007, Bankside Patterson successfully went live on EFACS.

While even the most successful go-live involves minor fine tunings and dealing with unforeseen events, Hardisty is certain that the hard work of everyone in Bankside Patterson and also the Exel consultants ensured that it was as smooth as could be expected. Taylor recalls. “The interconnectivity of the data across multi-level BoMs meant that a change in a certain component immediately flushed through not just the BoM in question but also every related BoM. Again, this would have all had to have been manually amended which would take time and potentially result in data discrepancies.”

Another benefit that was felt early on was the resulting confidence boost from the system’s transparency when accessing data. Whereas people had grown to distrust the old system they had to re-Iearn to trust not only what needed to be done and when, but that the materials etc required to do so would be in the right place and at the right time. Taylor says this should not be underestimated. “A lot of manual checks were taken in the early days but each time the system proved itself right and in doing so, won the confidence of the workforce.” Hardisty comments on this. “We knew people were on board because they quickly began to ask about further ways the system might be able to assist them in operational efficiencies.”

Visibility of information on what was happening throughout the company dramatically increased. Real time stock levels meant that re-order levels could now be accurately set which were at times significantly different to levels the company had historically been working with. There was also no longer the need for the company to operate with workarounds for the management of consignment stocks due to the specified and proven functionality within EFACS for the management of such resources. Taylor comments on the benefits this gave to managing the company’s supplier relationships. “In addition to keeping stock levels at a minimum, we could be much more accurate in terms of costing out a project beforehand so we could produce a cost analysis.

Ultimately however, the biggest benefit has been the way that EFACS has not just coped with but arguably enabled Bankside Patterson to grow at the rate it has. Not only has the scale of manufacturing increased but the multiple time savings resulting from users of EFACS being able to access information literally within a number of mouse clicks have enabled those users to do more value-added work to refine their own job or department.

Just as Taylor, Hardisty and Adams are united in their praise of EFACS so far, they are also adamant that much more is to come. As Taylor says, “As a system, there’s nothing we’ve asked of it that it’s said no to.” Adams is even more direct when he says, “We’re still to see the full potential of the system. Every day people are exploring EFACS further – it’s so functionally rich we’re only just scratching the surface.” Looking ahead it’s unsurprising therefore that Bankside Patterson has some ambitious plans for further developing its EFACS system. It is currently evaluating a sophisticated touchscreen based Shop Floor Data Capture (SFDC) module with EFACS that will enable real time visibility of Work in Progress (WIP) while also allowing actual schedules to be compared with projected schedules. It will also help identify further efficiency savings within each production process.

Another area of functionality within EFACS that is in early adoption is the system’s powerful Document Management tools, which will ultimately remove the need for paper archiving over a number of years. A related development is the consideration of an updated Computer Aided Design (CAD) package which can interconnect directly with EFACS at a BoM and individual component level ensuring that any design changes etc can immediately be reflected in the production and accounting data. Likewise, increased market intelligence based on improved sales performance data can be fed back into product development.

The final word however remains with Chris Adams. “The business simply couldn’t have continued to function the way it was with its dispersed systems. EFACS has given us a platform to undertake more business and operate more efficiently. As such, its put us in the place we need to be to build on our present success and on into the future.”