Informance News
Case Studies
Harboro Rubber
Harboro Rubber, based in Market Harborough, is a leading edge supplier of
rubber parts to a vast range of UK and European industries, including
automotive, aerospace, general engineering, electronics, defence and footwear.
The family run business that has spanned four generations is also a winner of
Honda’s coveted quality award. The company began trading in 1894 and since then
has been working with rubber since its introduction as an engineering
material.
Harboro had been using an ERP system, Visual Enterprise from INFOR, since
2001. Harboro found the system was good at handling orders, scheduling and
collecting data on the shop floor, but not at reporting. Since Harboro’s version
of Visual Enterprise was out of date and in need of an upgrade, James Briggs,
Chairman of Harboro Rubber, used the opportunity to evaluate QlikView.
James wanted to analyse his order book, see a breakdown of current periods
and orders on hand, material projections, margins, efficiency and cost. He also
wanted to be able to visualise data relating to dispatch, stock, purchasing and
reject rates, and was never able to look at errors in the data before.
Informance contacted Harboro proposing to demonstrate QlikView on site, using
Harboro’s own data.
“I was astonished to see my data live within two
hours and able to analyse things I had never been able to see before,” says
James “Informance was excellent. They are very friendly and helpful but also
solution oriented and very organised.”
James researched other business intelligence solutions, but none seemed to
perform adequately.
“I lost interest in the other products quickly.
QlikView was exceptional. It did exactly what I wanted it to do, and was
affordable,”
says James.
The first step in the implementation was specifying what Harboro Rubber
needed from QlikView. He continues:
“We agreed an initial list of
requirements that were to be implemented. There was trust on both sides rather
than extensive detailed specification on each of the applications since we did
not know exactly what was possible with QlikView,”
QlikView was implemented within ten days. James says:
“I didn’t
believe we would get it done in ten days, but the system was completed and ready
less than two months from the day I saw the product for the first time.
Informance has very good technical knowledge and quickly picked up on both our
database structure and what we were trying to achieve. The combination was
powerful in moving us forward.”
A feature James especially liked was that he can use QlikView to visualize
the largest areas of financial waste within the company on a weekly basis.
“We used to have to collect the data from Visual Enterprise and export
it to Excel sheets. This took several hours of work. I can now do this with
QlikView in less than a minute. I can see every single operation, which makes
areas of high waste very visible,”
says James.
QlikView has proven to be quick to master. Briggs’ son, Ian, a student at
Loughborough University, came aboard and extended and built the complete system
Harboro Rubber uses today.
James says:
“We combined my business wisdom with his software skills.
He learnt QlikView very quickly, as the software is highly intuitive, easy to
use and consistent all around.”
“QlikView visualises essential information about your business and
gives you transparency of its health, which is something SME’s desperately need
in an economic downturn. Implementing QlikView has made a huge difference for
our company. We have saved both time and cost by analyzing our daily operations
and visualizing our performance. QlikView has let us improve our customer
service, our delivery, quality and margin performance and I can also tackle the
biggest financial waste made in the company. This is essential in our current
economic climate”.
James found Informance to be an ideal partner and concludes:.
“There
was no ‘pulling out’ as soon as the main applications were developed and we felt
fully supported throughout. Informance were determined to deliver a complete
solution and have a happy customer rather than ‘doing what was required, billing
us and leaving it with us’ which is common with other companies who are just
revenue focused.”
