Background
The Mabey Group of Companies is a major British engineering organization that specializes in bridging, steel fabrication and construction products. Mabey & Johnson are the designers and manufacturers of the Mabey Compact Bridge, the most widely used Bailey type panel bridge system in the world for the establishment of single and two-lane crossings from a completely pre-engineered range of components.
In excess of 90% of the company's production is exported to over 115 countries as a permanent, versatile means of opening up even the most remote region, or for the immediate provision of emergency bridging.
Problem
Being the largest supplier of panel bridging systems in the world does not happen by chance. One of the hallmarks of Mabey and Johnson’s success has been a well coordinated and disciplined workplace. The Management Team at the Mabey and Johnson’s engineering facility in Lydney, Gloucestershire, wanted to keep it that way. Keeping track of staff working hours, overtime, and activities was critical for maximizing the production capacity of a skilled workforce. In particular, the management of production hours had a direct impact on delivery schedules.
The Production Manager was not entirely convinced the combination of spreadsheets being used to pull information together across different departments was accurate or even represented the information in the best way for decisions about production operations. There were at least four operational departments including Robot, Manual Weld, Anti-skid and Maintenance staff to be deployed. A strong input and involvement also included Management Support that facilitated HR issues and payroll.
Essentially information needed to be shared, and represented consistently throughout different parts of the organization. This included Team Leaders who managed actual production through to HR Management who understood and exercised the corporate ethic toward their workforce. For the Production Manager this meant access to the solution from anywhere in the organization.
Although spreadsheets were easily understood, could be quickly formatted to represent information in any number of ways they failed when it came to establishing common standards for information sharing. Also information became isolated, uncoordinated and quickly out of date. A system was needed to establish the workflow that would ensure consistency even when shared by people having different perspectives about the same information.
Solution
A pragmatic approach was adopted by the Management Team at the outset. The
low cost of Schedule24 Professional was attractive but not essential, in fact it was not a deciding factor, but the time getting a system up and running was. Moreover it had to deliver the functional requirements for scheduling multi-disciplinary teams. A short evaluation of Schedule24 Professional over two or three days proved positive, in particular its deployment on a Citrix server over the Windows™ network. This quickly established it could be accessed by Team Leaders on the production line and Management Support in HR. A major goal for the Production Manager was achieved.
A two day course quickly followed deployment. Immediate “hands-on” product training for two members of Management Support was delivered on the first day, followed on the second day by implementation of their designs for operations to automate the schedule production. The Management Support team subsequently delivered product training to the Team Leaders engaged on the production line.
The Production Manager identified improvements to the product interface that would facilitate the way teams worked and these were implemented. Following a review of business process, specialized reports were created and tuned to the business operation for calculating production hours in non-standard “weekly” formats.
Deploying Schedule24™ licence's concurrently over Citrix meant a reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) at the facility, while still enabling each Team Leader to have access to directly manage their team deployment throughout 24 hours 7 days a week. This included recording Sickness and Leave, in addition to scheduling activity involving training when it was required. This information could then be accessed for forward planning of production hours by senior managers.
HR issues involving sickness and total working hours were also available and accessed by Management Support. Everyone had access to the same information and more importantly, the deployment of the workforce continues to be delivered by those who have the knowledge on site - the Operational Team Leaders.
About Mabey & Johnson
The Mabey Group of Companies is a major British engineering organization that specializes in bridging, steel fabrication and construction products. The group has over one thousand people employed in around forty locations throughout Europe, the United States, the Americas and Asia Pacific - as well as a network of agents worldwide.
Mabey & Johnson Ltd.
Head Office: Floral Mile,
Twyford, Reading,
United Kingdom, RG10 9SQ |
Phone: +44 (0)118 940 3921
Fax: +44 (0)118 940 3941
Web site: http://www.mabey.co.uk |
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