Adwest Engineering

WinMan drives lean automotive group forward

The Magal Engineering Group of SMEs is the product of a management buyout (MBO) from parent company Dura in 2000. Comprising four UK-based subsidiaries, it supplies a range of parts to the automotive industry. Its subsidiaries are steel steering rack producer Adwest Engineering and Western Thomson Controls, producing thermostats both based in Reading, Adwest Cables in Stourport; and car jack producer Metallifacture of Nottingham, which also has a design and test centre in Stourport. A further two French-based engineering & production facilities, and one in India, complete the portfolio. In the early stages of the MBO, Magal’s directors realised they needed to source a lean-based business software solution that also offered overall flexibility, affordability, order traceability, and manufacturing-focused functionality. This was where Magal’s relationship with WinMan business software supplier SSL began.

A few years earlier, Kevin Lowen, Magal Chief Financial Officer, implemented a leading ERP system worldwide and stated: “The initial budget was £3.5 million, but when we had finished it had cost around £5.5 million. We chose what we considered to be an excellent corporate system. However we got caught up in the Y2K corporate compliant game, and paid a fortune to outside agencies.” Soon after the Y2K procedures were completed, Lowen and the other members of the MBO team, formed Magal. “For our new enterprise, we recognised that we needed to find a new computer system quickly,” Lowen explained. “Having become a little wary of business software systems in the wake of Y2K, and the long pilot programmes that some solutions providers recommend, we sought a system that could be implemented efficiently and quickly, was affordable and that was not overly complex. We were not going to be a Class A MRP user and had no intention of rocking the world with all manner of sophistication. We knew we were lean and mean in terms of manufacturing philosophy.” Because of the volatile nature of orders and price-downs coming from Automotive OEMs, Magal set about cutting its overheads as much as possible. This included looking for an uncomplicated software solution focusing on lean manufacturing. After studying the business software market, Magal whittled the list down to three main contenders.

The system that caught the eye of Group IT Manager Martin Blackburn was WinMan. “We were already three months in to the selection process when I saw a magazine advertisement for WinMan. After looking carefully at the system’s strengths I said to Kevin that this could be the ideal system for our needs. This was due to a number of things, including cost effectiveness, traceability of data and its strong manufacturing focus rather than being predominantly finance driven like so many systems. We then got the shortlist down to two vendors and after observing detailed demonstrations from the key contenders, our team of 12 chose WinMan as the company’s new system.”

The first WinMan order was placed in August 2002 at Adwest Engineering, and as early as 1 October it went live. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” said Lowen. “We had a limited timescale to get WinMan implemented and up and running and our confidence in WinMan was such that we didn’t see the necessity for a long and costly pilot programme, as we had with a previous system. And so far as training was concerned, all that most of our users really needed to know was how to fill in a purchase order, what fields to fill in and how this information would fit in with the tasks of their colleagues.” Implementation at Western Thomson then began on 7 March 2003 and went live on 1 April. AdWest Cables was then deployed and operational by the end of July, and Metallifacture went live at the beginning of October. Lowen spoke of why Magal was so impressed with SSL as a solutions provider. “SSL staff have the required expertise in dealing with lean issues. They understand our business process and are fully conversant in the discipline of manufacturing. We had a need, they understood it, and supplied a solution and an advice/support package that fitted our requirements.”

In Lowen’s view, what particularly drew the company to SSL was not only that it offered a system that could provide all the core functionality Magal needed in a Windows environment, it also offered virtual KanBan. “We wanted to use the product as a tool to help us in our KanBan drive to reduce stocks,” he said. Dave Downing, Logistics Manager at Western Thomson, added that since WinMan went live Western had already saved around £1 million in inventory from improvements in business processes, which are now complemented by the functionality of WinMan. The KanBan element within WinMan is focused on the supply chain, ensuring suppliers are kept clearly informed as to materials and parts required by Magal’s subsidiaries on a daily or weekly basis. On the shop floor, each subsidiary uses a manual KanBan process. Magal doesn’t involve WinMan in shop floor matters, preferring instead simply to feed materials/parts at one end of the factory and back flushes at the other. Downing added: “We have manual KanBan and a defined number of batches for each OEM customer. Because we’re speaking to our customers every day we have a good idea as to where we can adjust production levels, and this is all we need to base our schedules on. Our suppliers are on WinMan’s supply chain KanBan list, so they receive a weekly fax to tell them the quantities we want week by week. WinMan is invaluable in producing works orders and tracking them efficiently. And between these processes, WinMan helps us to control our Work in Progress (WIP) in a more lean, effective way. We had had enough of supposed scheduling-based systems. After all, we run a repetitive manufacturing operation. Traceability is very important to us for quality purposes, but in terms of saying we are issuing a 1000 batch of components today, for example, and want to find out whether we actually make 999 at the end of the chain, we simply don’t need to entertain this level of accuracy.”

As well as being an integrated tool for supply chain KanBan, back-flush processing and lean manufacturing in general (even being chosen by one of the showcase companies profiled in the Womack & Jones authoritative ‘Lean Thinking’ bible), WinMan also offers the functionality for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) between OEM customers and the SME supplier. “EDI is something we hope to get up and running as soon as possible, indeed we have already begun the process,” said Blackburn. “By being able to manage thousands of order lines through EDI, and also control drawing and photo sharing etc with our customers, will give us a further edge in the marketplace.” Blackburn added that the company will also utilise WinMan’s vendor bar-coding and e-commerce/Internet functionality in the near future.

As a final word, Lowen stressed that WinMan is an ‘unforgiving’ system in a positive and process enhancing sense. “It can come as a shock to the system when you first go live with WinMan, It does not allow us to bend the rules and enter stock that we don’t yet hold for example. However, the functionality, ease of deployment, and short learning curve for end users has proved WinMan to be an ideal system allowing us to go live with our four UK companies inside 12 months.”


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