I was hired as a marketing consultant by Intouch at the beginning of June. As a novice in the plastics industry I asked a lot of questions and I started to understand the system.
I quickly learned by talking to John (Intouch director) and Andy (Intouch sales manager) and reading through our customers reviews that if you install a system in your factory, it allows managers to see what’s going on and lets them make decisions which leads to making the factory run more efficiently. And that means that they can make more products with the same assets, make better use of the machines, improve the quality of the products, reduce waste, assure quality and so on. I also learned that our customers were more likely to be chosen as a supplier if they had a monitoring system.
So, to me it was a no brainer. Surely every factory must have one of these systems and my job was simply to raise brand awareness and communicate why our product was the one that should be chosen.
Not so, I was told. There are many factories that do not have any form of MES in place. So then I thought it must be because it is expensive. But that isn’t the case. It costs a fraction of the price of a machine or materials and the ROI is often a matter of months. In fact, Simon Anderson from LVS products told John at Interplas the other week that he wished he’d bought the system when he first met John, instead of waiting a few years as it would have saved him over £250K! How many moulding machines could he have bought for that?
Then it must be because it’s difficult to install or complicated to use and learn. That isn’t the case either with Intouch systems. They can be installed quickly, easily and retrospectively and without disrupting the manufacturing process. They are also incredibly simple to use because of the self-explanatory graphics, the drag and drop system, the intuitive scheduling and reporting module and so on, that after a few minutes of explaining by James (Intouch project manager) and Karl (Intouch director and head of engineering) even I was able to use it.
I was lucky to attend and help man the Intouch stand at Interplas and hear first hand about the issues faced by shop floor managers. I spoke to a shop floor manager who had originally been against having MES on his shop floor, but then after using Intouch for a while didn’t know how he’d coped without it. He now works for a new company and the first thing he wants to do is install Intouch in one of the UK factories he’s responsible for and then ultimately in all of them, spread all over the world.
If you’d like to learn more about Intouch monitoring, planning and reporting systems, please contact us and it will be our pleasure to send you information, arrange to visit you, arrange a demo or take you to a plant to show you the system in action.
Christina Larsen – Intouch
