Ford Aerospace in South Shields is an award-winning, highly successful specialist in the precision machining and pressing of components and assemblies. The aerospace, defence and related high technology industries are the company’s main markets.

Mark Podmore, 41, has been Operations Director with Ford since October 2009 and  heads a team of 150 employees at both Ford Aerospace and Ford Components.

The company recently underwent a major restructuring, with MRP and business planning brought under the control of Operations.

As part of this restructuring, Ford hired Giles Johnston of Smartspeed Consulting. His brief was to review business processes and provide an action plan for improvement of any identified problem areas.

As Mark Podmore explains, Giles had quite a task on his hands, “We knew ourselves that there were various issues and weaknesses in our business. This was especially true in relation to inter-departmental communications and the review processes.

“Giles had already undertaken work for the company and had in fact previously indentified the problem with our business structure as being too fragmented. There was already MRP and Business planning functions; all separate, with their own processes and targets and ways of doing things. It just meant that there was plenty of scope for confusion, crossed wires, things going wrong, especially in relation to our being able to fulfil daily orders.

“This is vital to our business as we deliver 600+ different complex part numbers to our customers each month. Our machinery runs 24/7, we have lots of processes and staff and it all has to work together smoothly – which it wasn’t.

“One thing Giles quickly identified was the fact that the MRP and Business planning team would take orders without communicating to the Operations team. Consequently, as a result our customer DSA (Delivery Schedule Adherence) was low and arrears to high.

“The first thing Giles did was to restructure our daily meetings to involve the whole team.. He replaced our Sunrise meetings with a Contract Review. Held at 9.30 every morning, this is conducted for all orders. This ensures that we have the engineering input, material availability and machine / labour availability needed to complete every order.

“Giles also restructured our Sunset meetings, making them much more practical and task orientated. They are held at 4pm each afternoon and we also have an early gathering at 11am on Friday. I suppose that rather means we can’t call it a Sunset Meeting!

“Giles designed and introduced an Order Fulfilling Process for us, for use in our Sunset Meetings. Essentially, this means that at the end of each day I can sit down with my team and tick off every task which needs to be done across the plant, to ensure that we meet our sales target.

“It also enables us to ensure that our internal Service Level Agreements are being met; to agree a plan for the following day and to identify any outstanding issues that need to be actioned.

“These changes have dramatically improved cohesion and communications between the various process team leaders and managers.

“Now everyone in the business knows exactly what they should be doing every day and our sunset meetings enable us to review that and ensure problems are put right ASAP.”

Giles’s intervention has proven timely, with him able to help the company at a crucial time.

Mark Podmore explains, “We expected 2010 to be a bad year because of the Recession but that really ended for us in March. Since then it’s been a case of trying to keep up with the business as it races along. In fact things are going so well we are now looking to recruit additional people.

The company has launched a five year strategy for growth and development and this includes investing over £1 million in new and enhanced technology.

The company has just signed off capital expenditure of £150k for an new ERP system.

Amongst its many strengths, a good Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system enables the flow of information between business functions and with the customer. Mark Podmore explains, “We are in this interim period during which we are investing massively in new technology. We are improving our business structures and bringing in people like Giles Johnston to make our processes more effective and efficient.

“Whilst we are awaiting the arrival of the new ERP system, it’s a case of working with old skills and technology.

“Giles Johnston has helped me get the best out of this, in working closely with me in getting this system working well.

“With all this new technology coming on-line over the next few months, our people are going to have learn to work differently, to embrace change, and Giles may well be helping us with that.

“In fact, he has done such a good job for us here at the South Shields plant that he is now working with the team at Ford Components at Monkton.

“Planning is absolutely essential to us, the machines run 24/7 so good scheduling is vital, hence our having brought in Smartspeed.

“Thanks to Giles Johnston I am now much more in control of the Operational side of the company and our business processes run much more efficiently and effectively.”