There are plenty of different reasons why a company might decide to buy and implement a new business system. In some cases, the decision is carefully planned and timetabled in advance. Often, though, the process is in some way forced – by customer demands, by external pressures such as Year 2000, or by corporate change. In these last cases, time pressures tend to be even more intense than in the average implementation, and budgets stretched. It’s in these circumstances that user companies really need help from their chosen vendor.

That was certainly the case when Turtle Wax Ltd (TWL) decided to invest in a new ERP system. Based in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, Turtle Wax’s UK operation makes the company’s well-known car care products, which are retailed through a wide range of outlets, principally car superstores such as Halfords in the UK and appointed distributors overseas. Traditionally, though, TWL’s connection with the retailers has been one step removed: the company maintained a 30-year relationship with a distributor. This partner managed all of the TWL’s UK forecasting and sales order processing, as well as dealing with distribution – meaning that the manufacturer had very limited requirements for business IT systems.

However, when the decision was made to sell directly, not only did the company need to develop its own direct sales channels, but also the back office infrastructure to support the change. A trawl of the market for ERP systems saw TWL shortlist five vendors, and after evaluating those vendors’ systems against specific needs, selected the TROPOS fast-response ERP system developed and marketed by Basingstoke-based SSI.

The fact that TWL had previously outsourced so much of its UK order processing to its distributor meant that the implementation of TROPOS was a considerable challenge – and inevitably, imposed significant time pressures on the project team. Resources were in short supply at the start of the project and, as European IT manager Jacqueline Smith recalls, this meant that SSI’s consultants had to be especially hands-on.

“Jason White, our consultant, was for all intents and purposes, a Turtle Wax employee for the duration of the implementation,” she says. “We had some significant time pressures during the project, and had we not been so well supported by SSI, we might not have achieved a successful implementation.”

The first phase – which went live in September 1998 –covered sales order processing, finished goods stock control and distribution. Turtle Wax uses SSI’s TROPOS Incoming Generic Interface (TIGI) to link direct to its logistics partner, Exel.

There’s one area in which installing TROPOS has had a dramatic effect on TWL’s business – manufacturing planning, which formed the core of the second phase of the implementation. Before the TROPOS project, planner Victoria Atherton effectively managed a manual MRP operation, using separate stock, order and forecast reports. Now MRP – as well as sales order processing – is automated. Management reporting has dramatically improved, with sales and margin figures available at the touch of a button, as well as production summaries, inventory levels, and sales and stock forecasts.

Jacqueline Smith says that the second phase of implementation ran far more smoothly than the first, because the company learned from its earlier mistakes. “We knew that we had under-resourced phase one,” she says. “So, in phase two, we made sure that we involved more people – and made those individuals, in supply chain management and planning, for example, responsible for their own data.”

Shortly after the completion of phase two of the TROPOS project, TWL’s American parent company hired a new management team to run the UK operation. The new management reversed the previous decision to sell direct, and went back to the use of a distributor to deal with the company’s customers. Purchasing and planning manager Tim Woods explains that, on one level, this simplifies operations – having one single source for the vast majority of orders is obviously more straightforward than having hundreds – but, at the same time, the increased separation from actual customer demand increases the difficulty of planning production. “It’s vital for us to improve communications with our distributor at customer service level,” says Woods “ We are trying to become more demand-driven, and that really means improving our forecast accuracy.

Seasonality is a major issue for TWL, with a huge peak occurring between March and late spring, as the retailers begin to place large orders for the summer. Although the plant is not running anywhere near full capacity, Woods says that the inevitable overtime needed at this stage of the year puts great strain on the company. “The overtime bill is huge and needs to be reduced, but the biggest problems is that we just don’t have two sets of supervisory staff,” he explains. “Clearly we can add more labour, but running from eight in the morning until ten at night on weekdays, and shifts on Saturday and Sunday, makes huge demands on our supervisors.”

TWL’s solution is to manufacture earlier in the year and build up stock levels, thus enabling it to fulfill orders from stock even at busy periods. Woods concedes that this extra stockholding incurs extra costs, but says that analysis has shown it to be a better solution than even more overtime.

“Product and packaging represent the largest proportion of our costs,” says production manager Derek Warren. “Labour is only a relatively small part. We have a variety of suppliers for commodity chemicals, but there are other ingredients we can obtain from only one source.” TROPOS is being used to help TWL get its packaging stocks down, and Warren says that the company has made major strides in this regard.

“Scheduling production is relatively straightforward,” says Derek Warren. “We do need to ensure that we schedule different coloured products in a coherent way, but that’s only the real complication.” TWL has two basic production processes, mixing the chemicals to assemble the product, and filling the products into its packaging.

These processes, Warren says, match fairly well so there is little difficulty with in-process WIP. Product variation is extensive, and growing – because the Skelmersdale plant has recently begun producing on behalf of Turtle Wax’s subsidiaries in Holland and France, and will soon take over from the subcontract filler being used by the firm’s Danish operation – but the changeover process is relatively quick and easy; only about 30 minutes for a washdown, though longer will be required if the packaging is to be changed. “TROPOS makes it much easier to add extra production,” says Tim Woods. “We’re also managing to make significant improvements in our stock turnover.”

“On time in full delivery (OTIF) is our key metric,” says Tim Woods. “TROPOS has helped us make dramatic improvements in our delivery performance, though we’ve still got a long way to go.” Jacqueline Smith says that although TWL has had a fairly changeable history over the past few years, it has become substantially more efficient due to the implementation of TROPOS. “SSI’s people helped us get through some difficult periods,” she says. “Now, we’re much better equipped to grow our business.”