Adam Furniture
Adam Furniture is a £3.2 million, 46-employee
organisation which has been manufacturing kitchens and bathrooms
since 1973. The business is still owned by the founder's family and
its factory, warehouse, showroom and offices are all located in
Droylsden, Greater Manchester.
The challenge
For Adam Furniture, the major challenge in the last three or
four years has been its changing customer base. Previously, key
customers comprised a dozen or so main distributors across the UK;
these distributors combined the units with worktops, appliances and
other accessories before selling them on as whole kitchens to
retailers. Now, Adam Furniture's clients include builders and
property developers, as well as the general public. And for some
clients, Adam has taken on the expanded role, previously the domain
of the distributors - buying in worktops and appliances as required
so it can supply 'whole' kitchens to its clients.
This has not been without difficulties, as the business gets to
grips with the priorities - inventory
levels, delivery schedules, service demands, and more. Adam
Furniture has had to change its processes to be able to respond to
these new demands, as Finance Director Tracy Hannon explains, "With
the distributors, we had fewer customers. The distributors held
enough stock to be able to turn orders around in a day or two, and
we delivered to them on a weekly basis. So, if we omitted an item
from a delivery, it wasn't the end of the world as we could include
it the following week. Now, the situation is quite different; we
have more customers and it's vital we deliver the right order at
the right time. It's really sharpened our focus on service and
there is much more pressure in terms of information
requirements."
There is also more pressure on the business as a whole. "The new
clients don't have the same commitment to a business relationship,
after all they are not buying our product week in, week out. So
product quality and service are vital to our reputation. We can't
afford mistakes," says Tracy
"... the information gains have been excellent... we're
getting orders right first time" Tracy
Hannon
Finance Director
As well as new clients - and the new routes to market - Adam
Furniture has also increased its product range enormously in the
last couple of years. The kitchen units alone, for example, have
more than 40 variants.
Add to this the fact that its previous business software only
really supported the accounts function, and it is all the more
impressive that Adam Furniture has been able to sustain its
reputation and service levels. "Any software we had was very
fragmented," says Tracy. "We had a Unix-based accounts package, but
beyond that it was pretty much all spreadsheets. In the factory,
the shopfloor machinery such as the saws and drills are computer
controlled, but there's no integration with any other system. This
meant that in the manufacturing area, any materials planning was
seat-of-the-pants stuff and we had no way of linking different
parts of the business. If a customer called to query whether an
item was in stock, for example, we'd have to send someone into the
warehouse to look."
The solution
Since stock information and
materials planning were the key drivers, Operations Manager Phil
Balham led the search for an MRP solution. However,
once the search began, says Tracy, "we analysed our processes and
realised we needed a system to manage much more than just
materials". A number of software suppliers were invited to visit
Droylsden to demonstrate their systems. "Access Supply Chain stood
apart from the others from the start," recalls Tracy. "They worked
hard to understand our business and they had taken the trouble to
load some of our data onto their system - this meant the demo was
relevant to everyone; we could understand the system and the
benefits it could offer our business."
Adam Furniture chose Access Supply Chain and the process of
training and implementation began. From the outset, Adam Furniture
decided to spend extra time on training, and it has paid dividends.
Tracy says, "The system is very easy to use, but it was so
different from our old Unix software that we didn't want to risk
subjecting our people to information overload. So we sent teams for
specific training: the sales team one day, the buying department
another day, and finally the accounts team. It really has paid off
as the system became second nature to everyone very quickly."
Benefits
Indeed, just six months after the system went live, Adam
Furniture enjoyed significant benefits - some unforeseen - which
enabled the business to sharpen its processes. Previously, when an
order was placed, there was manual intervention from the start. "If
we take kitchen furniture for example, in our business this is
supplied by three or four departments," explains Tracy. "The units,
or carcasses, are from one area, the doors from another, and the
accessories such as cornices and plinths from another area. Our
despatch department, therefore, had to break down each order into
an appropriate list for each of these departments - all on separate
pieces of paper." Clearly this was not only time-consuming, but
also risked errors. "With Access Supply Chain, we can put orders in
as complete units, so the sales office doesn't have to break it
down into components. And the system generates picking lists
automatically for despatch, giving us instant traceability. So the
sales and despatch departments were where we had the two biggest
early gains, in terms of man hours and data accuracy."
The comprehensive reporting capabilities have also proved to be
a boon. "We didn't foresee what a difference this would make at the
outset," says Tracy. "The data is there at our fingertips and,
because it's a Windows system, we can export figures to other
programs like Excel or Word very easily. For
me, that's been a great feature - if I just want to take a snapshot
of any aspect, such as outstanding orders or value of stock being
held, I can pull that information off and email it to the
appropriate people." This wasn't impossible before, says Tracy, but
it took "an age" to find the information from several sources,
retype it and issue it. "Now, it's so quick and easy to do any
analysis."
For Adam Furniture, the visibility that Access Supply Chain
brings to the business is crucial. "I can already see that we have
achieved our original aim, which is to have up-to-the-minute stock
information," says Tracy. "This means we can manage our
stockholding much more effectively, so the next step will be to
reduce it. That will be a key financial benefit to us, the
capability to reduce our stock to a minimum."
Other benefits, too, are apparent. "Throughout the business, the
information gains have been excellent. This means we're getting
orders right first time, so we've cut out additional despatch costs
and improved customer service. Our original objective was to
improve the service we provide and we're certainly achieving that.
It's such a competitive market that we operate in so it's not
enough to supply great products without excellent service."
Summary
Adam Furniture has plans to ensure it exploits every inch of the
Access system. Tracy concluded, "We're really happy with how well
everyone has taken to the new software and intend to really draw on
all the functionality that's in there."
For Adam Furniture, what began as a search for a manufacturing
control system has resulted in the implementation of a new
enterprise-wide solution, which has led to unexpected rewards for
the entire organisation.
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