Founded in 1968 in a small shop in Lyminge, HV Wooding has grown to become one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of precision engineered components and assemblies, serving customers including Rolls Royce, Honeywell, Schneider Electric and ABB for over 30 years.
Parts manufactured by HV Wooding can also be found in over 22 million UK homes and continued success has seen the company’s turnover double in six years, reaching £13.5m in 2012.
HV Wooding has five key areas of work: Busbars, Presswork, Wire Erosion, CNC Machining and Sub-assembly. With an average split between 70% Make-to-Order (MTO) and 30% Make-to-Stock (MTS), the company produces approximately 1.2 million parts per month. Depending on the nature of production, order sizes can range from single items to substantial batches measured in hundreds of thousands, with lead times varying from next day on MTS items through to months for complex custom parts, where tooling also has to be designed and manufactured.
Simon Harre-Young, IT Manager for HV Wooding, explains some of the typical challenges that the company faces. “While many of our components do have a significant number of configuration options, our greatest challenge tends to be keeping pace with customer’s changing demands. Optimising our capacity requirements is also central, in terms of our highly skilled workforce as well as our diverse collection of machine resources.”
Visibility of what information was where, as well as what product was where, had traditionally been a problem and was a consequence of HV Wooding being reliant on a number of bespoke IT systems, spreadsheets and manual processes. Not only did this lead to data variance and duplication issues, it made it difficult to access a coherent sense of finalised information.
To read the article in full, please click on the following link: Manufacturing & Logistics IT – HV Wooding enjoy ongoing success with Exel EFACS E/8.
