Software business adds another coachbuilder to their customer base
An increasing number of vehicle conversion companies & coachbuilders are being attracted to E-Max Systems’ software and the opportunities it offers them. E-Max Systems’ newest customer, the leading British family coachbuilding company, Eagle Specialist Vehicles Ltd (Wilcox), recently joined several other vehicle conversion companies who have already adopted E-Max as a solution to their increasingly complex production process.
E-Max ERP software enables vehicle conversion companies to streamline their processes and increase their efficiency. The company behind the successful software, E-Max Systems, which celebrated their 20th anniversary in 2018, are exhibiting at the Commercial Vehicle Show 2019 for the first time.
“We hadn’t considered attending an event like the Commercial Vehicle Show before” said Jason Pritchard, Sales Director of E-Max Systems, “but after speaking with some of our customers, including Wilcox and Clarks Vehicle Conversions, who are long time attendees and exhibitors at the CVS, we realised that actually there could be any number of companies in this industry who would really benefit from using our software to improve efficiency and cost savings in their workplace. Exhibiting here seemed a great way to let these companies know about E-Max and see for themselves how our software can help them.”
Providing a competitive edge
With competition in all areas of UK manufacturing at an all-time high, from both UK and international companies, the team at E-Max Systems are keen to give their customers a competitive edge. Mr Pritchard explains some of the ways in which E-Max can benefit vehicle conversion companies, or indeed any company involved in manufacturing parts for the automotive industry.
“Because vehicle conversion businesses deal with large bills of material (BOMs), it is difficult to work out when they need to place orders to have the right materials available at the right time for production. Historically, production departments have used spreadsheets to try to manage this process with limited success. E-Max removes the guesswork and manages the materials requirement planning (MRP) for production, ensuring stock quantities are easily calculated, ordered and delivered in time. This is exactly what vehicle conversion software should do – simplify everything, leaving the production team free to focus on other aspects of a job.”
“Stock control becomes significantly easier too, as E-Max ERP includes a comprehensive stock management system and we’ve seen that the performance of stores is much improved after E-Max is introduced. With a large number of parts involved in most jobs, and regular revisions made to these parts, there’s a lot of information for companies to process and record. E-Max will store all of this information and it’s really simple to access, so anyone working on a part can quickly pull up plans to check for any revisions.”
Capacity planning and scheduling improves workflow
Mr Pritchard continues:
“We’ve also found that the way vehicle conversion companies work using cells often meant that certain bays could quickly become overloaded, with multiple vehicles often going through the welding or electrical or interior bays at any one time, whilst other bays might be empty. E-Max’s scheduling and capacity planning functionality resolves this issue as it contains details of every job and can calculate the optimal route for each order, using required delivery dates or other metrics as desired. This has meant a big reduction in downtime and overcrowding in bays for our customers.”
Save time and reduce errors
“One of the most popular features of E-Max is the ability to duplicate a bill of materials for another job and make adjustments to it. There are huge time savings to be made (and less errors) in not having to create a complex BOM.”
“Being able to copy over a BOM and then change it to meet another customer’s specification is a huge benefit. Often the end customer wants a bespoke finished vehicle and our customers can now get timings and costs to them within a fraction of the time it used to take before E-Max. In the same way, because our customers can create and apply routing templates with E-Max, their production manager can quickly select from predefined options and no longer has to spend hours, even days, recreating these manually.”
“There’s also a couple of neat little features that E-Max has that really impressed some of our customers. Whilst it’s vital that stock control is accurate, there’s times when someone is using small parts like nuts, bolts, cap screws, and it’s just not efficient to issue these individually to the job so these items are stored in buckets around the bays. E-Max ‘back flushes’ this – when the operator has completed the activity, they tell E-Max they’re done. E-Max then issues the material to the job based on the information held within the BOM and updates stock levels,” explained Mr Pritchard.
Jade Webb, trainee MD at Wilcox said:
“We are excited to be working with E-Max and implementing E-Max ERP. Having all of our processes fully integrated into one system will make a huge difference to us and we were very impressed by the simple and intuitive interface, which will enable us to get up and running quickly.
“It was great to find an ERP provider like E-Max who are committed to getting their system right for us and not trying to ‘fit’ us and our processes to the system. We wish them every success at the Commercial Vehicle Show and look forward to visiting their stand.”
For more information on E-Max ERP, contact us here or on 0141 644 4424. Alternatively, you can request a free demo to see E-Max ERP in action and to find out how using an ERP system can benefit your business. You can also visit E-Max at the Commercial Vehicle Show at the NEC between April 30th through to May 2nd 2019.
