CASE STUDIES

In2grate Business Solutions > Case Studies > Cobble

In2grate Business Solutions helps Cobble to control costs and improve delivery

The world’s largest manufacturer of carpet tufting machinery Cobble Manufacturing comprises of two manufacturing plants in the UK and two in the USA, with sales offices in Germany, Belgium and China and a world-wide network of over 20 agents.

Cobble remains at the forefront of tufting technology through a policy of anticipating, identifying and responding to industry requirements and trends. Cobble now supplies over 60% of the world’s tufting machines outside of the USA.

Cobble Manufacturing decided to standardise their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications across all their operations. Utilising Jobscope Enterprise ERP to provide the tools for online, real-time, job costing for it’s Make-to-Order focused business. Cobble selected Jobscope Enterprise to reduce labour costs and gain efficiencies in materials management and supply chain control.

If any company can be described as a Make-to-Order one, it is Cobble Blackburn. This is a company that builds 25 tufting (carpet-making) machines a year, all of which are different, except for the very rare occasion when one customer has a need for two identical units. Cobble also has to keep detailed records of the customer specific design and engineering specifications of each machine it supplies. This enables the business to fully support each machine at the customer through it’s Field Service Engineer support and spares supply operations.

For over 25 years Cobble had been using an ICL stock control based system which was heavily bespoked and the need for change was imminent. The system and processes were not tailored to an order driven environment. It was unstable and resource sensitive. There was a need to implement a company wide strategy of business process re-engineering with the inclusion of a logistics and accounting system.

In a record implementation taking less than seven weeks, the Lancashire based company moved over from managing its business with a classic MRP system to using Jobscope, a management information system which is specially aimed at order-driven companies. As a result Cobble and its customers are seeing the benefits as Jobscope helps Cobble to control costs and improve delivery performance.

With a combination of In2grate Business Solutions and its Jobscope package, Cobble identified an ideal solution. No other supplier actually took the initiative during the proposal stage to set up a demonstration of their software using production data specific to Cobble.

“In2grate Business Solutions asked us for company data. It showed their real commitment to the project. It also resulted in a demonstration that was based on information that was familiar to us,” said Jason Kent, Cobble Blackburn’s IT and QA Manager. “ Using Jobscope we can book labour and material purchased directly against a contract. We are not constrained to using classic work orders in the machine shop which we felt created unnecessary paperwork and posed serious constraints on how costs were allocated.”

The Jobscope package that In2grate Business Solutions proposed was also particularly well suited to Cobble’s needs as it manages customer order driven businesses. In2grate also played a critical role in the implementation process.

“They were pro-active and methodical. It was a key partnership. We both monitored progress on a twice weekly basis,” adds Jason Kent. “ The simplicity of Jobscope is also a bonus. It is off-the –shelf software and easy to learn. Everyone picked it up very quickly – it is a real success story.”