For immediate release
27th March 2003
Jarvis increase business by 20% with reduced workforce due to increased efficiency.
Jarvis Manufacturing, a specialist textile packaging company based in Eastbourne, UK had traditionally run their business on a range of paper-based systems since the company was formed in 1975. Now employing over 30 staff they could see that for the business to grow they had to reduce the workload required to action every task within an order’s life cycle. Said Robin Hawgood, Partner; “Everyone had individual computers that were not even networked - we were duplicating and even triplicating work. None of us were really IT-literate and as a result we were spending a great deal of money on local consultants for general support. We looked at different MRP systems for a year, and even came very close to buying one at £12,000, however with all the extras and training it came out closer to £25,000, which is difficult for any company of our size to justify. Then we saw Rent-I.T. Obviously, the fact that there was no great up-front outlay was attractive, but we also believed they had a good product - they would not survive as a company with this business model if the product wasn’t good!”
In September 2000 the other main business partner, Bill Cobbold, attended the evaluation workshop, decided that Rent-I.T. was a suitable match for his business and allocated staff to attend training. Within two months four staff attended training courses, however internal business pressures delayed the project for several months. . The decision was made to go with a 7-user Rent-I.T. system in April 2001. After a new network was installed Jarvis set about an implementation plan in July, hiring two university graduates to assist, with the system going live in September.
Stock control was the first area to go live on the system, and immediately yielded visible results. Commented Robin, “We have around £100k of stock at any one time and it used to be out by as much as 20%. We’d perform partial stock checks every month - now we stock take annually as we can trust the system. Stock errors are now less than 5% either way, allowing for human error. Once you have accurate stock information it has a knock-on effect of speeding up other processes. For example, we save a day’s work on our monthly accounts. Accountants work from cost up, whereas we work from sale price down. Before, the figures would never match, but the figures we pull out of Rent-I.T. tally with the accounts system. We are now considering only producing quarterly accounts as Rent-I.T. gives us the business information we need.”
Jarvis do not have a set range of products, instead offering a product manufacturing service, resulting in thousands of products. Producing quotes for new, modified products used to be extremely time-consuming, with relevant information stored in different offices throughout the building. Added Robin, “As the information is on the network building quotes and giving delivery times is quick and accurate. Half of all our production is outsourced to machinists - Rent-I.T provides us with stats on ‘time per part’ giving us an accurate picture of true cost and profitability. We also now run a quality control system that is far in excess of the present ISO 9002 criteria.” Overall customer response time has also been improved - sales orders reach the shopfloor within 24 hours as opposed to 2-3 days previously. Four people (plus a part-time accounts clerk) now manage work previously handled by six, and this is with an increase in order volume of around 20%. In addition, all staff that are trained on Rent-I.T. can now perform tasks that they were previously not trained for; useful in the event of staff absence.
By their own admission Jarvis are not yet taking full advantage of Rent-I.T. but are already delighted at the results, recently adding another license to the system. At a celebratory dinner in November 2002 the Directors of Rent-I.T. were guests of honour as, in the words of Bill Cobbold, ”We are absolutely delighted with the business improvements we have made over the past 12 months, and Rent-I.T. has been the main vehicle responsible. It is flexible and drives us down a standard route. With no previous MRP culture in the company we had a mountain to climb, but Rent-I.T.’s excellent telephone support allowed us to implement the system ourselves.” Robin finished by adding, “It’s the only system we’ve looked at that was reasonable in cost and could achieve 95% of what we needed in a system without having something written specifically for us.