UK Manufacturing success I believe UK manufacturing is largely about niche strengths and our nation is certainly brilliant in this regard. I suspect that is probably always going to be the way it is. We don’t associate UK manufacturing with being about producing lots of low-end cheap components. For example, the UK manufactures very high-tech construction and agricultural machinery and specifically within the fluid power industry you find equipment such as precision valves and hydraulic instrumentation that Webtec offers. In our county, Cambridgeshire, other industries are developing highly innovative products and solutions for the pharmaceutical and medical sector and so on. Many UK companies that are designing, developing and producing this equipment sit a little below the radar and are not necessarily household names. Nevertheless, they are often leaders in their field, and I think we should promote this fact more widely because the national newspapers don’t always paint a particular rosy picture of UK manufacturing, which I believe can be somewhat damaging. We often get the impression that UK manufacturing is all about household names such as Jaguar Land Rover or Nissan. So, I think quality, niche UK manufacturing has always been there and continues to be there but needs to be better recognised publicly. Another event that can muddy perceptions about UK manufacturing is when the parent company is acquired by an organisation based in, say, Germany, Japan or the USA. The company is often then perceived as predominantly or wholly foreign even though much of the development and production continues to take place in the UK. Benefits of structured data Webtec invested in an Epicor ERP system as early as 2006 and we have kept it updated ever since. This system covers everything from CRM and manufacturing all the way through to finance. For us, this has become the bedrock of the company. We have five companies in the group, including the sales companies and holding company, and they all use Epicor so we can all see each other’s transactions, we all trade with each other and we use the same database for our warehouse. The power of having all that data centrally can’t be underestimated. We can all access the same structured data knowing it’s reliable and clean. Over time, by using standard and custom analytical tools within Epicor we can get better information which helps us to act quicker and more nimbly. Mass customisation The traditional way of doing things was for manufacturers to make lots of parts for stock, then take items out of stock to ship to customers. However, with a modern ERP system such as Epicor, manufacturers can make every job specifically for a customer’s order within a short lead-time and dispatch it quicker. When going through the system every customer’s job is unique, which lends itself to mass customisation, and you can easily track all of them. The advantage of this is that if we manufacture, for example, a hydraulic tester with a bill of materials comprising 50 separate parts, we can track every item and where they were made within different areas of the company. We can also track the status of each part, if they are yet to be completed and delivered to assembly. So, whether a part is still being machined, whether they’re currently being tested or whatever, we know the status. We can also feed that information to customer service, so they know whether a product is on track to be made and delivered on-time. Home-grown company, world-class quality and service 54 www.bfpa.co.uk Martin Cuthbert, Managing Director. Webtec. Martin Cuthbert: “Many UK companies that are designing, developing and producing this equipment sit a little below the radar and are not necessarily household names. Nevertheless, they are often leaders in their field.” Make it BLUE® Webtec calls its approach to customisation Make it BLUE®. This is what we believe to be a unique four-step process to help customers maximise the
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