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Custom Plastic Components Manufacturer Achieves Full Traceability with MRP Software

September 2, 2024

After a long search, Cellular Mouldings found a user-friendly MRP software platform that enabled the company to improve administrative efficiency and achieve end-to-end traceability. “MRPeasy has been a major timesaver,” says Peter Matthews, Managing Director.

From shoe soles to custom plastic components

Cellular Mouldings is a custom plastics manufacturer based in Corby. The company was started in 1975 as a division of Parker Shoe Company producing moulded foam soles for the parent company. The business was incorporated in 1991 and has since then branched out into three different disciplines, producing plastic extrusions, polyurethane foam products, and rigid polyurethane components for a variety of customers. Today, the company employs 34 people and has an annual turnover of around £3 million.

Spreadsheets became unmanageable

Until 2021, the company was using spreadsheets to manage their whole operation. While the business was growing, however, the spreadsheets were growing more and more complex, finally starting to compromise effective communication and process efficiency.

“I am quite adept at Excel but when I released these complex workbooks to other employees to work with, they very quickly deleted something that impacted the functioning of the sheet,” says Peter Matthews, Managing Director. “As the author I was often the only person who could fix these issues, this made my workload much heavier.”

Clients demanded traceability

The decision was made to implement software that would integrate the various functions of the company from incoming orders to outgoing shipments. All in all, they were looking to get a better overview of their whole operation that would enable them to understand and improve their efficiencies across the board. In addition, their growing customer base had started to ask for traceability measures to be in place.

Finding the right solution was quite a long process. While Peter knew what they needed was an MRP system, he had a hard time finding one that felt right for their business, even though the company was looking for quite basic functionality: order management, shipment tracking, traceability, inventory tracking, and purchasing.

“I found most solutions very clunky and complicated,” he says. “I actually shelved the idea because I was sure we weren’t going to find anything that fit our company.”

“A breath of fresh air”

And so, Cellular Mouldings continued operating on their intricate spreadsheet system, with the prospect of finding a better solution slowly fading away. But one day, Peter decided to do another quick search and what he found changed his mind about MRP completely.

“I came across MRPeasy, and it was a breath of fresh air,” he says. “The design was easy on the eyes, it was quick, intuitive to use, and accessible from anywhere. I clicked with it right away.”

After a rigorous testing process, the decision was made to adopt MRPeasy. The implementation process was spearheaded by Peter himself, with no external help, except for the software documentation and demo videos available on MRPeasy’s website, and MRPeasy’s support team.

“The fact that I could do it by myself shows just how intuitive the software is,” he states.

Having a complete overview of the operation

The system change, coincided with an administrative employee retiring and a new person coming in, which presented a good opportunity to do things differently and increase the company’s administrative efficiency. Apart from finally firmly establishing its BOMs, Cellular Mouldings has significantly improved its order processing and tracking with the new system. All events related to orders are now recorded from the moment an RFQ or order is received to when it is delivered, providing full product traceability.

“I now know what’s going on,” Peter states. “I don’t have to go around asking people, I can just open MRPeasy and take a look. This easy access to data has been a major timesaver for the company.”

To other growing companies that are looking to do things more efficiently, Matthews recommends finding a suitable solution and implementing it slowly, one step at a time.

“We’re just scratching the surface with MRPeasy, but we’re already seeing significant improvements,” he says.