Capacity Building to support Growth
- Ventac
- Acoustic Solutions/Sound Insulation
Background & the Client Challenge
Ventac is a leading global supplier of high-performance acoustic solutions and sound insulation to organisations in the commercial vehicle and industrial noise control sectors.
Having already successfully navigated a period of growth, Ventac had significant ambitions for further expansion.
The client understood that key to delivering on these future growth plans was making sure operational processes were scalable, ready and able to accommodate additional capacity.
The Ventac Leadership Team identified that some “growing pains” existed in the business.
Specifically, they recognised there were operational bottlenecks in Supply and Production.
With a focus on ensuring the operation was ready to scale to meet future growth, Ventac decided to bring in 3SIXTY.s acquired
What We Did
Working closely with the Ventac Operations teams, we looked at customer demand for 2 and 3 weeks into the future. With the focus on the front-end of the process, together we mapped the process between Warehouse and Dispatch – to ensure that the customer was central to all decisions.
As part of this, daily and weekly stand-up planning meetings in Production were implemented.
By studying the activities, problems, processes or projects Ventac sees on a constant/daily basis (“runners”), together with those they see regularly, but not all the time (“repeaters”), together we were able to implement in-process kanban locations. This allowed the Ventac Team Leaders to level production demands by managing these kanbans.
As part of this, Ventac was also able to eliminate the scourge of the “urgent job” that previously interrupted production flow and led to inefficiencies.
5S has been rolled out in the cut area, ensuring that the materials and people move efficiently through the process. 3SIXTY trained the Ventac team on 5S and that team has since duplicated the 5S process across the production floor.
Ventac now has a revised New Product Introduction (NPI) process to enable customer service and engineering to flag on SAP when new products or product revisions are in the plan. And this flag then allows the Operations team to ensure drawings and Production Part Approval Process (PPAP) packages are completed ahead of production schedules.
Within supply chain, we worked closely with the Ventac team to map the end-to-end Procure to Pay cycle, VSM and identified some of the 8 lean wastes in the process.
Working as a single team, we mapped the end-to-end procurement-to-pay cycle through a process called Value Stream Mapping (VSM). This helped us identify and tackle some of the 8 Lean “wastes” that were slowing us down. We also built a more resilient Supply Chain model. This involved mapping out the potential risks in our extended network of suppliers, and finding ways to reduce those risks where we could.
We worked closely with Procurement to identify efficiencies among some of Ventac’s key suppliers. This led to savings of 2.5% of spend, as well as improved payments terms which will improve Ventac cash-flow.
“We wanted to work with a partner who could hit-the-ground-running; could understand our business quickly, and work with us to make the changes we knew needed to be made. We didn’t want “advice”. We wanted actionable solutions and we wanted them implemented. 3SIXTY delivered on all of these fronts. As well as bringing deep Operational Excellence expertise, they provided valuable insights and effective solutions for key changes we needed to make. We are now better placed to deliver the highest quality to our customers, and grow our sales in line with our ambitions”
Darren Fortune, Managing Director, Ventac
Results
By recognising the need to ensure the operation was scalable, ready to meet the demands which would come with the next phase of growth, Ventac was able to deliver:
- Increased throughput in Cut Operation by 18% with zero additional investment in equipment or resources
- New process for verifying material availability on SAP means stock-outs are now a rare event
- 5S programme in place in Cut Team and training delivered across the business (5S is a Lean methodology to ensure a more productive workspace)
- Revised NPI (New Product Introduction) process built into SAP ensuring better introduction of new products
- 2.5% reduction in Supplier spend in 2nd half of 2023
- A Supply Chain Relationship Management programme to be launched to identify true partners
- End-to-end review of the Procure-to-Pay Process and recommendations made for improvement
- Standardised approach to preventative maintenance
- Roadmap to quadrupling throughput in line with ongoing sales growth identified
Brian O’Brien
Partner & Head Of
Growth Strategies
Get in touch to find out how 3SIXTY can help your business deliver its full growth potential.