Epwin Group boosts productivity with Epicor Mattec MES

Epwin Group, a manufacturer of building products, has expanded its range over recent years, opening up new markets while consolidating its offering to traditional customers. For a company already tight on capacity it needed to improve overall productivity to ensure it met customer demands.

Lack of validation and verification

Alan Humphries, system developer at Epwin Group says, “To maintain high levels of customer service and product quality, while maintaining manufacturing costs, we continually improve manufacturing efficiencies. Production defects and low productivity can have a huge negative impact on business, so it’s vital that we evolve our processes and systems to improve in these areas.”

To meet these demands, the Group needed to replace its software with a system heavily focused on process control. The existing solution was a manual system that made record production and retrospective recording a lengthy task, adversely impacting productivity and offering no real validation and reporting accuracy.

Using this system, the company saw many reporting discrepancies because it relied on employees manually tracking completed tasks without any validation or verification. These inaccuracies meant it was difficult to monitor performance and management concluded it needed to install a new system.

Additional benefits

Epwin Group’s process control challenges pointed to the need for a manufacturing execution system (MES). The Group looked at several vendors’ products before selecting Epicor Mattec. Epwin Group had an existing relationship with Epicor, and chose Mattec for its capacity to evolve, as its business needs grew.

After successfully implementing the system to monitor production lines, the company realised that Mattec’s array of features could deliver many more benefits.

Humphries explains, “After running Mattec for a couple of years, we decided to experiment with the system and began looking at how the company could make better use of software features to improve accountancy, production and data validation, as well as how it could gain overall equipment effectiveness as a key business indicator of performance.”

Epwin Group now uses the Mattec system to account for all production scrap as well as all key business measures, and the company has implemented a full barcoding system to improve traceability of stock throughout the business.

24-hour visibility

“The real-time element of Mattec is certainly the best part of running the software. Our employees are able to react instantly, and in turn, can make more-informed decisions based on better data. With our previous software, we would have to put pieces of historical data together and wouldn’t know if something needed to be done right away.

“Now, rather than letting something go wrong, we can deal with it immediately because we have access to real-time information,” concludes Humphries.