Mr. Dave Rantor , Production Director

My expectations about the impact of the new system (SAPI):
This system started about 4 years ago. I suppose we first started grappling with the problem of how to become more efficient and more effective in the future. I suppose that there were two driving forces. First one was the need to contain costs and to make better use of the resources that we had. There was a shortfall in the capacity. We have enough people, we have enough management resources and we give out warehouse space. It was actually the manufacturing capacity that was defective. So there were options there. We could either build a new plant which could have cost us about £200 million or, we could not take the business, or, we could better optimize the utilization of our existing capacity.
We need something that was going to help us to plan our resources more effectively and when we looked at SAPI that seemed as though it was going to do just SAPI was going to ensure that we only manufactured that which we needed, it was going to reduce our inventory, it’s got potential for planning our materials right the way through the whole of the manufacturing process. It was also going to enable us to plan the utilization of our people much better. The obvious result of using our resources in a more effective and more efficient way was that we would bring our unit cost down and that should make us more competitive. The other beauty is that we’d be able to bring in more business without having to go to the corporation and ask for more capital. So it seemed to fulfill a number of problems that we were grappling with.
I guess the second big advantage we saw in the culture change was to do with the way we wanted to implement MRP- we wanted to implement its company-wide. It was going to have an effect on everyone within the company and it was going to give us an opportunity to do a lot of team building and to encourage teamwork, to focus people’s attention on common objectives. There was going to be a need to do a lot of training, training if done within the right groups, could do a great deal to enhance the feeling of teamwork amongst the various departments and also within departments. I think what we said is, well here’s a system that depends upon people, and the advantage of this system is that it’s got a computer that’s going to enable us to ensure that our data is accurate. However, it’s only going to work for us if people accept that the computer is merely something that’s going to play with the numbers and that it’s the people that are still going to make the decisions. It’s the people that are going to determine how successfully we make use of that computer system.
It is not the SAPI that is going to change the way in which we operate, it’s going to be the way that people handle SAPI and the way that people make decisions when they have got the better information that is going to be available from that system.