Industrial textile manufacturer Don & Low has completely overhauled its IT systems with assistance from e-business and supply chain specialists, SSI Ltd. SSI helped Don & Low bring together a complex web of 'best-of-breed' solutions in a £2 million project covering five sites and two businesses. SSI's TROPOS supply chain software now lies at the heart of a system which will help Don & Low to run its business more efficiently and deliver better service to customers.

Don & Low is a major European manufacturer of industrial textiles, headquartered in Forfar, Scotland, with a history stretching back 200 years. The company is currently owned by Thrace Plastics and employs around 600 staff at five sites in two major businesses - woven and non-woven textiles. It has a turnover of £46 million.

"While an initial impetus for the system replacement project was to be able to deal with the Millennium Bug, a key driver was an IT strategy produced to improve and change the way we do business in the new millennium" commented Karen Souter, project manager for Don & Low.

Souter explains that the project enabled the company to tackle a number of other business issues. "We had a patchwork of systems which we could never have taken forward in a consolidated way. Bringing all that information into one system gives us transparency of information and helps us manage our processes from end to end."

In particular, linking the various elements in the manufacturing cycle through a single system would allow Don & Low to improve its planning. The company also knew that an integrated approach was vital if it was to introduce changes to shorten its lengthy manufacturing chain. This used to last up to six weeks and involves stockpiling significant amounts of buffer stocks to ensure machines were able to keep running. Finally, the company wanted to be able to run "what if" scenarios in its planning process and use reporting tools on top of a core database to produce flexible business information quickly and easily.

Selecting the right supply chain solution would be key to the success of the project and Don & Low took considerable effort to ensure it made the right choice

"We originally thought we would introduce one single system across all areas, but what we chose was a best-of-breed solution with SSI taking responsibility for the integration," Souter explains. "A key factor in our choice of SSI was that not only could they offer the right combination of products, - we would have chosen all the different offerings if we had selected them independently. - but they were also willing to take responsibility for integrating those five or six products into a completed solution."

The backbone of this end-to-end business solution is SSI's supply chain solution, TROPOS, which has been integrated with several other products including: Don & Low's existing Unitrac contact management system; new shop floor data collection systems from Barco; Greycon's S-Plan finite scheduling software, which schedules work onto various machines; Coda financials; and Cognos PowerPlay and Impromptu reporting tools.

According to Souter, Don & Low decided not to work with the largest ERP suppliers such as SAP and Baan because it felt their developers were too remote and that they wouldn't be able to influence the product. "We wanted a supplier we could work with in true partnership," she explains. "SSI owns and develops the package itself and, at its current size, we are still able to have implemented enhancements for our industry sector, so long as SSI feel they will benefit their core product."

Souter points out that such changes were few thanks to the rich functionality within the core TROPOS product and power of the Software Developers Kit, which allows users to reorganise processes and add extra elements without compromising the basic software package. For example, Don & Low has developed simplified data entry screens for production staff, but TROPOS is able to take that data and manipulate and store it in the right way behind the scenes.

In those few areas where the underlying TROPOS functionality didn't match critical aspects of Don & Low's processes exactly, Souter says SSI was willing to make slight changes to the core package rather than forcing Don & Low to compromise. "SSI was willing to spend time understanding what we wanted and would then try to fit it into the TROPOS product. If they couldn't, they were flexible about the options," she explains. "We also felt very comfortable with the SSI people. We felt very confident they knew what they were talking about and they made a real effort to understand our business."

Don & Low used SSI's Talisman methodology as the foundation for the implementation. The tight timescales for the project - just thirteen months from selecting TROPOS to going live in October 1999 - meant that key to the success was the company putting in place a strong project management structure to underpin the implementation methodology. However, Souter says, "Talisman is useful as a starting point, because most companies have never done anything like this before."

According to Souter, the biggest issue in the project was simply the quantity and complexity of integration to be undertaken. "We did try to be ruthless in selecting what we did, but there were so many areas which were crucial," she points out. She says a significant component was the integration of S-Plan with TROPOS. "That hadn't been done in such depth anywhere else and the relationship between SSI and Greycon was still in its infancy when we started, so we suffered from having to bear the brunt of that integration work during our project," she explains. "However, the two products are now well integrated, with SSI and Greycon still adding minor enhancements to improve the solution further."

Souter adds that the integration work was further complicated by the fact that Don & Low consists of two separate businesses. The wovens business uses traditional looms to weave polypropylene-based fibres into products such as carpet backing and post-office sacks. The non-wovens business, however, uses technology which extrudes polypropylene fibre and spreads it across a moving frame to create rolls of material for applications such as crop coverings. "Although we are using the same software in both businesses, they have different requirements, so even when we had solved issues for one side of the business, we had to re-solve them for the other side. That meant we had to go through the hoops multiple times to find a solution that would fit both."

Don & Low also went for a big-bang rollout, even though it knew it was a high risk strategy. "We realised early on that if we were going to implement the system in stages, we would have to divert resources to writing interfaces with existing systems. We decided that we had to jump off a cliff and go for it," Souter explains. "I think if we had introduced the system in phases, we might not have completed the rollout in time to be millennium compliant. Even so, the tight time scales meant we were developing and simulating the solution right up until the last moment before go live." She adds that the company paid close attention to risk management, especially during the later stages, and made the board fully aware of the implications of decisions about when to go live, which finally occurred in October 1999.

Throughout the project, SSI provided a 'facilities management' service to support the new infrastructure required for TROPOS. It also worked closely with Don & Low's information systems manager to install and configure the Unix server, Oracle database and 150 PCs on which TROPOS now runs. The next step, over the coming year, will be for Don & Low to become self-sufficient in these new skills and take the operation of its systems back in house.

The new integrated system, known as Dallas, now covers every aspect of Don & Low's business. Potential customers and quotes are managed through the Unitrac contact management system. When a customer places a firm order, the details can be automatically transferred to TROPOS to raise a sales order. The demand generated by that order is passed into the TROPOS planning system, which in turn raises a work order. This is passed across to Greycon's S-Plan finite scheduling system, which schedules the work onto a particular loom or extrusion machine and confirms a delivery date back to the TROPOS sales system, so that the sales team can let the customer know when the order will be available.

The schedule is also brought back into TROPOS so that its impact on other steps in the process, such as production of tape for weaving, can be assessed. That information is then passed back to S-Plan so that these steps can also be scheduled and on to Barco's PCMS shop floor system to create work lists for each machine. Once the product has been manufactured, PCMS records operational data, such as the length of product made, and returns this data to TROPOS to complete delivery of the item into stock.

From here, TROPOS handles despatch of the order, generating all the necessary shipping documents and pick lists. Furthermore, it has been linked to the Intermec radio frequency (RF) handheld terminals used by staff in the warehouse to allow them to access and capture data as they receive and pick goods. The final stage involves raising an invoice within TROPOS and passing it to the Coda Financials suite, which now handles all of Don & Low's accounting needs.

The new system successfully saw the company through the Year 2000 rollover and helped it ship record levels of product in its first couple of months of operation, but it's still early days when it comes to achieving long-term benefits. As Souter points out, "you can't achieve all your business benefits in just four months. We spent time during the implementation looking at where we wanted to be in the future and ensuring that the way we set the system up initially would allow us to move in the direction we wanted to go. We now have to put in place processes to achieve those longer term aims. This year will see us pushing forward on medium and long term planning as well as taking advantage of the new reporting facilities we have and strengthening the links between the contact management system and the sales admin side of TROPOS."

The company expects to achieve a number of targets over the next few months: shortening the time taken to respond to customers' requests for information; reducing its buffer stocks at each stage of the process; and minimising downtime through better scheduling.

One area where the company is already starting to see major benefits is reporting. "Reporting is much more flexible and we can get reports much more easily," says Souter. "The management information is now there and it's accessible."

Now that the hard work of the implementation is over, Souter would have no doubts about recommending SSI to other process manufacturing companies. "We had direct lines into key SSI people and they were responsive to what we were trying to do," she says. "They had the resources to meet our needs and we got good service during the rollout."