: supply chain management

Isola : Supplychain Management

Improving service quality and driving cost out of the sales process

Company Profile

The development of Isola is closely connected with the success of a unique compound: the thermosetting plastic. Founded in 1912, just a few years after the invention of Bakelite, Isola has always been a pioneer in the field of laminate technology. Customers benefit from the many years of experience and specialisation in Electro-Technology and the electronics industry, but also in mechanical and light engineering.

The Isola production programme is characterised by its diversity and quality:

Base material for the manufacture of printed circuits
Industrial laminated plastics in the form of panels and tubes as semi-finished products or finished parts
Moulded articles made of thermo-setting moulding materials, e.g. lamp housings, parabolic casings, office machine frames
High performance composite material

The Isola group of today has a multi-national character. Its core is the parent company of Düren. Through building their own and acquiring other companies they managed to occupy most of the important centres in the electronic industry. With the acquisition and integration of the Italian base material producer MAS, Isola was able to strengthen its position in the European market and is today one of the leading base material producers in the Western World. The group has a total of eight locations in Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, USA, and Great Britain In 1984, Isola France in Bonneuil near Paris was founded. The subsidiary acts not only as a sales company but also operates an extensive warehouse and processing department. The forming of this new company has made Isola a market leader in the area of base materials for printed circuits in France. Great Britain is the second largest electronics market in Europe after the Federal republic of Germany, 40% of this demand is located in Scotland. For this reason Isola built a factory to manufacture base materials in Cumbernauld Scotland.

Product

In the UK Isola manufacture high quality base materials for the printed circuit board industry. The product is manufactured within the UK in Cumbernauld in Scotland. Typically the product is glass fibre and copper foil laminate material which is produced in large sheets and then cut down to various sized panels according to customer's specifications. There are a considerable number of variations possible of size; thickness; laminate construction; and resin properties which results in a very large number of possible finished products. This variability makes it totally impractical to hold stock of finished product without incurring huge costs and thus all products are only made to order.

Isola Truck

The manufacturing process itself has a cycle time of several days, if a product were to have to be made directly from the raw materials. This would normally limit the customer to ordering well ahead of the need for the material in their production cycle.

Isola have developed over a number of years a specialist manufacturing control and order processing system that allows this limitation to be overcome. Based upon a predictive analysis of past order profiles manufacturing scheduling is carried out in such a way that next day delivery can be achieved on 98%+ of all orders placed before 12:00. In one case where the customer is located close to the Isola plant, same day delivery is regularly achieved.

The key to this ability is two fold, firstly the close and highly focussed service based relationship with the customer and the predictive manufacturing scheduling system. Objectives The philosophy of the company has always been to provide the maximum level of service to the customer. The objective of this project was to enhance the day to day service of the sales department and improve the overall productivity of the department. The improvement in the productivity would allow the sales staff to develop a better relationship with the customers and spend time adding value to the more complex or difficult sales.

Practically the sales department staff were repeatedly spending a considerable amount of time providing basic information to their customers. The information ranged from advance warning of consignments to confirmation of all outstanding orders, as well as technical information regarding product and historical quality information.

The initial objectives of the project were thus defined as:-

Allow the customer to obtain information On-Demand in real time

Outstanding orders
Consignment details
Lot Quality Information

Minimise the requirements for the customer to have specialist hardware or software
Minimise the need for customers to require training or specialist expertise

These three basic requirements formed the basis of the systems design.