Rangemaster (formerly Glynwed Leisure) is the UK's leading manufacturer of stainless steel and moulded plastic kitchen sinks employing 300 staff at its Nottingham site. It currently exports a third of its production, with customers in more than 40 countries around the world. In the UK, Rangemaster supplies its products through a number of channels, including large DIY chains, kitchen manufacturers, builder merchants and major distributors who supply to small high street boutiques.

Over the last ten years, the company has experienced dramatic growth, taking a significant share of the UK market and becoming a major exporter. However, as the company expanded both the range and volume of products it manufactured, it found that its information systems could no longer meet the needs of the business.

A key objective for Rangemaster was to improve lead times and to be able to provide very accurate delivery dates to its customers "As with most businesses, our product quality is taken for granted and we don't want to be differentiated on price alone," points out FD Mike Bufton. "However, we didn't have the ability, when a customer phoned up to place an order, to accurately tell them when the products would be manufactured and when they would be delivered."

At the heart of Rangemaster's difficulties lay the fact that the company's existing system lacked a sophisticated production scheduling application which could be linked to the sales order process. Introducing such a system would allow sales staff to look at current stock or work-in-progress and provide accurate available-to-promise dates.

Such a system would also help Rangemaster make the most of its manufacturing capacity. "We work with large presses and we don't want to do lots of tool changes because we lose a lot of capacity during the changeover," Bufton points out. "Operating reactively to customer orders leads to high costs and low efficiency. A sophisticated scheduling system would allow us to work in a structured way in the manufacturing area and maximise capacity and efficiency - while at the same time ensuring we can continue to meet customers' demands."

A final benefit was that, by replacing its legacy systems with a millennium-compliant solution, Rangemaster could be confident its systems would survive the transition to Year 2000.

To help it to establish its detailed requirements and select a suitable system, Rangemaster worked with consultants from KPMG. After evaluating a number of solutions, the company opted for SSI's TROPOS

Bufton explains, "We liked the fact that all the key parts of the applications were available in a single platform. Most other vendors had a manufacturing scheduling module which was an add-on from a third party rather than one that was written and integrated by themselves. That was a key difference in the SSI solution and gave us extra confidence that we would achieve our goals."

Rangemaster also felt TROPOS was flexible enough to incorporate and handle add-on systems for specialised needs such as, bonus systems for hourly-paid workers without the need for bespoke development. "We wanted to move to a system with absolutely no bespoke elements so that upgrades would be easy, while the risk of bugs in the system would be reduced," says Bufton. "We were impressed by the fact that SSI maintains just a single, standard version of its software across all its customer sites. And where we do have specialised requirements, we can write small applications using products such as Microsoft Access which will work alongside the main system without impacting on its integrity."

Finally, SSI could support Rangemaster's need for a turnkey solution in which all the different hardware and software elements would be brought together and implemented by a single supplier. On top of that, Rangemaster was impressed by SSI's approach to implementation, which involves both a review of the customer's business processes and a conference room pilot to allow processes and systems to be tested before they are introduced into the business. "The main benefit of the conference room pilot approach was to allow us to look at the whole business at once and avoid leaving major gaps in our implementation," says Bufton.

He adds, "It was also a very useful exercise in establishing and documenting the way we work in terms of our business systems. We ended up with a fully documented system manual explaining how we operate key business processes, right down to screen prints of what people will see, highlighting which fields need to be filled in, together with a narrative of how the transaction is carried out and what step it forms in the process. New starters can now be given the relevant section of the manual and that helps considerably with induction and training."

Overall, the implementation took ten months to complete and TROPOS has been running live at Rangemaster since the middle of 1996, with around fifty staff currently using the system. Now, when an order comes in from a customer - mainly by telephone - the sales coordinator can enter it into TROPOS and immediately find out whether the goods are stock or currently being manufactured or whether they need to be added to the production schedule. This allows Leisure to provide customers with accurate available-to-promise dates, rather than standard lead times, and even to arrange part shipments if desired.

If goods are in stock, TROPOS creates a picklist for the warehouse, together with a despatch note and invoice. If goods need to be manufactured, the details are automatically passed to the scheduling system. TROPOS is then used to produce a weekly production schedule which includes manufacture for stock, forecasts for customers who place orders regularly but with some variation, and made-to-order items. Based on this production schedule, TROPOS automatically generates an MRP plan to pull in all the necessary raw materials and components.

Because it can now produce these schedules, Bufton says Rangemaster has moved from "a predominantly made-to-order approach to an approach focused around generating distribution requirements based on sales forecasts, sales from stock and only a small number of made-to-order items." This ensures production can be carried out with minimum tool changes, allowing capacity to be maximised, while enabling the company to continue to meet customer demands.

Since introducing the system, Bufton has identified a number of key areas where Rangemaster has seen marked improvements. "Our overdue orders are significantly lower than they were,” he points out. "We are also able to offer customers a lot of products on much shorter lead times, typically reducing them from three weeks down to seven working days. At the same time, we have been able to reduce the stock we hold by ten per cent."

There have also been a number of softer benefits, mainly in the areas of customer service. According to Bufton: "There is increased awareness among our existing customers that our service levels have improved and we will be able to use that as a selling point to new customers. And because Leisure has become less reactive in its manufacturing activities, we have been able to realise benefits in other areas because people aren't doing so much firefighting."

The next stage will be to exploit the ability of TROPOS to handle the customisation Rangemaster often provides in the packaging stage. "We may make one design of sink," Bufton explains, "but brand it through packaging or turn into an added-value pack by including accessories such as a waste kit, taps, a chopping board and so on. So customisation is important to us and TROPOS has given us the potential to look at handling that in a different way and making further improvements to both the service we provide to customers and the lead times involved."

Rangemaster is also considering adding barcode readers to the system. "We are constantly looking at add-ons and developments to the hardware and software platforms which can give us competitive advantage," says Bufton. "One of the strengths we were looking for and found in the TROPOS system is its flexibility: we can make use of currently unused functionality and add additional hardware and software while maintaining the integrity of the TROPOS database."

Key Requirements

• Improve customer service, reducing lead times and providing accurate available-
  to-promise dates
• Improve planning of manufacturing operations to minimise the number of tool changes
  and maximise production capacity
• Implement an enterprise-wide packaged solution which could handle all aspects of the business, eliminating the need for bespoke development and addressing millennium-compliance issues

The Problem

• Improvements to customer service hampered by an inability to provide accurate available-to-promise dates and reduce lead times
• Inefficiency in the production process because of reactive approach to customer needs and high proportion of make-to-order production runs
• Bespoked systems becoming difficult to maintain and support and not millennium-compliant

The Solution

• SSI's TROPOS supply chain management system, which provides an integrated view across the business, allowing sales staff to provide accurate available-to-promise dates and shorter lead times
• a sophisticated production scheduling and planning module within TROPOS, which allows Leisure to run its manufacturing operation more efficiently while continuing to meet customer demands
• a turnkey implementation of a packaged solution, which is nevertheless flexible enough to handle new needs without the need for bespoke development