Founded in 1992, the managers of Chesterfield-based DC Rolfe Ltd certainly know how to run a successful engineering business.
The capability and accessibility of manufacturing software thirty years ago when DC Rolfe set up shop was far from the situation now in 2023. Instead, they opted for a mix of paper-based and spreadsheet systems.
We interviewed Operations Manager Hayden Sharpe, who joined DC Rolfe nine years ago as an apprentice, to find out how, as a small engineering business, they use Statii MRP.
Only developed in the mid-1960s, MRP systems were simply unattainable to most small to medium manufacturers. DC Rolfe, like many businesses, even today, used "spreadsheets and word documents to create delivery notes and invoices, and of course notepads. We would all have to input information manually." said Hayden.
The old manual system started to take its toll, "it was becoming exhausting to manage," according to Hayden.
Hayden said, "it was difficult to do an order book search. There needed to be scheduling, and occasionally things would go missed or unordered."
Based in Chesterfield, the owners of DC Rolfe knew the creators of Statii very well, being engineers themselves. Having mentioned some of the issues they were having with their manual system, they tried early versions of the Staii MRP and were among the first to implement it.
When we asked Hayden what three Statii features he would find it hard to live without, he initially answered:
"Statii makes my job a lot easier, and it is a lifesaver. It is the core of the business."
Hayden continued to list the three features:
Like many companies, DC Rolfe always wants to increase profitability and margins. Regarding manufacturing, the critical factor affecting margins is the quoting accuracy against the production time.
Using Statiis' shop floor data collection system (SFDC), DC Rolfe can collect time stamps associated with jobs to gain real-time profit performance.
Hayden said, "we'll use Statii to monitor how long things are taking to try and make the jobs required time, inputted at the quoting stage, as close to the actual production time as possible.
