2008-4-10
Snug Company, one of the UK's leading bedding manufacturers, achieves rapid and effective implementation of Fastreact to support business growth.
Founded in 1980 Snug Company has become one of the leading UK manufacturers of duvets, pillows and mattress protectors supplying major high street and out-of-town retailers, supermarkets, wholesalers and mail order houses. They also supply a premium product range under the Dreamland brand.
Snug have constantly invested in research, technology and machinery to ensure that their products remain innovative, high quality and value for money. Their automated state of the art factory in Gateshead utilises some of the most modern and up-to-date equipment available.
Snug are focused on providing excellent customer service and this means being very flexible and responsive in satisfying customer needs. In today’s retail environment, customers are placing more frequent yet smaller orders and are demanding shorter lead times. With little or no forward forecast information from customers, production and material requirements planning can be extremely challenging.
As a business, they have to ensure that all available capacity is used efficiently and that they have a steady flow of materials available to meet planned and unexpected order requirements.
Production planning has historically been carried out using a series of spreadsheets but as Snug has continued to grow, they have invested in new machinery to enable them to meet demand but lacked visibility in what was actually happening in their factory. More importantly, the ability to forward plan their capacity and material requirements and respond to last minute customer requests was becoming more difficult.
Snug recognised that their existing systems were not going to support their future growth plans. Having invested heavily in new machinery, they needed to employ a solution that was going to give them full visibility of what was happening in their factory and put them back in control of their production planning process by reducing the number of manual systems being used.
Fastreact, which has a proven track record for the delivery and successful installation of production planning systems, was the obvious choice as a solution to meet their requirements.
Fastreact’s easy to read planning board has given Snug immediate visibility of any manufacturing capacity constraints and the materials requirement planning functionality enables them to plan around any material availability constraints. They are also utilising the bulk order processing function allowing them to consolidate multiple orders for the same product thus ensuring optimum capacity utilisation and increased production efficiency.
“The implementation of Fastreact at Snug comes as a huge relief in supporting our programme of continuous improvement. To have a proven solution that was installed within a matter of days and thus enabled the operational team to take control of the production planning process so quickly has been impressive” says Peter Hancock, Managing Director.
“Fastreact has enabled us to be much more confident about meeting future challenges within the business, particularly the reduction in production costs and the ability to react quickly to changing requirements. Fastreact will ensure that we continue to deliver excellent customer service.” Fast React Systems Ltd
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