Palmer makes Progressive move

Palmer Timber supplies softwood, clear softwood, hardwood, laminated timber, and wood based panel products throughout the UK.

The company has taken on the bisTrack software from Progressive Solutions and now has 26 staff using the system.

The company operates a large modern milling facility, producing standard and customer specific mouldings from its base in the West Midlands. Its panel products operation offers a modern cutting service, and carries in excess of 2000 stock items.

"As soon as production started after each stock count, the figures
were out of date, rendering them unusable for management reporting."

Before bisTrack, Palmer was using a business management system, which was set up to take any mill order processing into account. It wasn't flexible enough to be tailored to work in the way the operations team wanted it to. Consequently, as soon as the raw materials were used to create another product, traceabilty was lost in terms of stock control. "In terms of basic sawn stock, we had accurate figures, but to achieve accurate stock control across the business, we had to hold a time consuming, full physical stock count every quarter as well as at year end," says Palmer's Kevin Edmonds. "Frequently, we found that the actual stock count we came up with was different to what the system led us to expect it would be."

As soon as production started again after each stock count, the company's figures were out of date, rendering them unusable in any meaningful way for management reporting.

Edmonds looks after timber purchasing for Palmer and, before bisTrack, would have to spend the first three days of every month taking stock usage data off the old system manually and putting it into spreadsheets for forecasting purposes. On bisTrack, he has a live six month purchasing schedule he can access at any time.

A project team was elected to source software which would deliver accurate stock control across the business. Palmer's finance director, Peter Kerr headed up the project team: "During the selection process, it soon became obvious that bisTrack was the only system which was being developed and was going forward. In fact even between the two bisTrack demonstrations we had, some features had already been progressed. After the second demo we felt it was a system we were satisfied with and it ticked most of the boxes."

"we were one of the
best prepared sites"

Following demonstrations to all departments of the bisTrack software, implementation of the system took around nine months. The team also organised intensive staff training on the system before going live, which paid off, Edmonds says. "Progressive's Nick Rogerson, who handled our implementation, said we were one of the best prepared sites."

According to Edmonds, staff were initially shocked at the volume of information required to put in to the system at the outset. "The reward is that you save time when searching for information later on because it will always be where you expect it to be."

An immediate benefit for Palmer was accuracy of stock, he says. "We're regularly over 99% accurate now. Our auditors are so happy with the numbers that there's no longer a need to do year end stock counts, since we use a perpetual inventory system throughout the year. This was something we hadn't even targeted."

Operations manager Ian Cox adds: "The saw mills are also more efficient now because of bisTrack. Salesmen used to put orders out assuming the stock was there. The sawmill would gear up to machine a product but when we went to fetch the raw material, it wouldn't be there. Now we can set up our machine schedules safe in the knowledge that stock shown on the system is there. bisTrack allocates the source materials, assigns the process and records the finished product.

"The stock location feature lets us see exactly where stock is - in which shed, on the quay or being processed off site. And it also allows us to manage stock in both loose and pack quantities for timber and panel products."

Kerr says: "Once we started building up information we could trust, we started seeing real benefits. If stock accuracy was the main benefit, then quality of management information was the next. We were able to use the system to accurately analyse the profitability of jobs and the results were often surprising. The system is actually helping us from a management point of view in confirming that the general direction we wanted the business to go in was correct."

 

_{© 2010, kindly reproduced courtesy of Builders Merchants Journal.}