Carlisle-based Bendalls Engineering was founded in 1894 and was once a division of Carr’s Engineering. The company specializes in the design and manufacturing of specialist steel fabrications as well as the assembly of electromechanical equipment. Its customer base of major global players spans a wide range of industries and territories as far afield as Azerbaijan, China and the United States.
As an Engineer to Order (ETO) company, Bendalls needs to focus on every aspect of each job to keep costs within budget, meet delivery dates, and maintain quality standards. Its internal management processes and systems have to operate within an environment where there is little in the way of standard products or sub-assemblies, and no Bill of Materials (BOM), forecasting of demand, standard costs or buying of materials in advance.
Syspro has proven flexible enough to effectively encompass the way Bendalls operates – from quote to invoice – and provide the management support the company needs. When an order is received, Syspro creates a job number and job file, without the need for a BOM. From this point, the important information and documents relating to the job are made accessible.
Tracking individual job costs and progress on a daily basis is also an easy task. The system’s WIP module allocates costs to individual jobs, with labor entered manually from daily time sheets, and material costs set against the jobs as soon as items leave inspection. From this data, Bendalls produces a weekly modified report that shows the total cost build-up of each job to date along with the cost of committed materials. The report also includes the original estimate, enabling ongoing reconciliation of actual cost against estimate.
By using the WIP report to assess progress of all ongoing jobs, production control can determine present and future workload and identify which fixed resources might become stretched, or where there might be low utilization.
In addition to the benefits delivered by the WIP and Purchasing modules, Syspro has enabled new disciplines such as the inputting of information at the appropriate time, saving time and effort. The preparation of accounts and invoices is also more professional, ensuring all essential information is accessible through a single, centralized data source.
The flexibility of the Syspro solution enables Bendalls to deliver the greater discipline, practice improvements and enhanced project management it needs to compete more effectively.
Bendalls’ existing system, which covered manufacturing, purchasing and accounts, was neither meeting the business needs nor providing the anticipated benefits. The Bendalls management team sought a solution to help reduce lead times, enhance customer service, gain control of processes, and improve both costs and the quality of make-to-order products.
Bendalls selected Syspro based on its ability to provide an integrated data flow throughout the business, with sales, engineering, purchasing, production and accounts each having access to a single data set.
