Relyon Beds

Relyon's Recent History

Relyon Beds is located in Wellington, Somerset, UK. Originally known as Price Brothers, in 1966 Relyon became a public company known as Relyon Group PLC and used its financial strength to diversify into other furniture and non-furniture related industries with only patchy success; such as kitchen design and installation (Solent Furniture)through to CCTV (Photo-Scan). It became clear that without any synergies between the acquisitions, lack of executive management expertise in these industries and the level of necessary investment that Relyon would become vunerable to changes in the economic climate.

This was indeed the case. After a very profitable mid-eighties, the recession early in the next decade exposed the flaws in the strategy and with the retirement of then MD Ralph Platt the non-core companies and product lines were jettisoned by the new Chief Executive, Ian Topping. Despite some success in refocussing the company it became increasingly clear that Relyon did not have the size to exploit economies of scale to reduce costs and increase reach in an increasingly cost-conscious yet quality-seeking consumer market. Inevitably, in 2001, the group lost its independence and was acquired by Steinhoff International Holdings Ltd.

In addition to the Relyon bed division, the Steinhoff UK Group includes: Pritex, an industrial foam and fibre products business; Norma, a leading mattress manufacturer in Holland; and Steinhoff UK Furniture, the Group wholesale and distribution arm in the UK. As the market leader in the production of high quality mattresses, divan sets, storabeds and bedframes, the Relyon brand can be found in all leading furniture stores in the UK.

A full illustrated history of Reyon can be found here http://www.relyon.co.uk/images/stories/General_Graphic_set/Relyon_Heritage_Booklet_small.pdf

My Career at Relyon: 1988-1996

1988-1990 Introducing MRP

During its prosperous years, Relyon was keen to hire new staff and this included hiring one new graduate per year. I had recently graduated from Glamorgan University with a Business degree. I was a little reticient about joining Relyon as it did not seem to have the prestige of the other companies I was interviewing with like Rolls Royce, BP, Rover or Racal. In hindsight it was the most forunate outcome. Both Racal and Rover got subsumed into other companies and in all probability I would not have got the freedom to take on a varied number of projects, virtually unsupervised.

There was no deliberate strategy to provide me with an all round management experience. The truth was they had decided to hire a graduate but with no idea what he/she would do. I was placed in the Special Projects department with an elderly colleague, coasting quickly to retirement, as my manager. Six months earlier, Relyon had purchased an MRP system sitting on an Informix database and Unix OS. Our role was to implement the MRP system within the company.

It soon became clear even to me, inexperienced as I was, that Relyon had no viable plan, objectives or methodology to implement the software. In the absence of any other direction, not least from my manager, I learned the software, the Informix reporting application and spent my days trying to sell the program to other managers. Focusing on Inventory Control and Purchasing I felt was most likely to provide the most tangible benefits to the company in the short-term.

The Warehouse Managers and Purchasing Manager were sold on the idea as it provided the promise of more timely information without too much extra work. Up until now all Purchase Orders were typed. Having them retrieved from a database of inventory of parts, suppliers and prices printed from the system saved a great deal of time and, above all, looked professional.

Better still, purchasing until now had no visibility of inventories execept from a weekly updated cardboard stock sheet. They were forever phoning the warehouse wanting to know what to buy. Now they had the stock levels at their fingertips and after setting up Reorder Points and Quantities, purchase requistions were automatically generated.

Within 18 months we had moved from a 100% paper-based system to one that:

• Controlled our inventory levels.
• Generated purchase requisitions for raw materials
• Generated PO's and maintained a Supplier and Parts database
• A cycle-counting system.
• A reconciled financial actual cost, FIFO inventory system

The MRP/ERP market was maturing quickly and small MRP applications were starting to lose out to more sophisticated ERP packages. Our provider sold out to an agglomerator selling an application on a similar platform.

1991-1994 Implementing Baan ERP

Project Manager

I was not impressed with the new owner of our application when he came down to demo his recommended replacement for our system. They were little more than a two-man outfit with some programmers kept well in the background. Our COO was ambivalent. He was attracted by the low conversion costs but he at least was will willing to hear me out that we needed something better. The owner of the software reluctantly agreed to provide a demo system for my appraisal. I developed a comprehensive functional testing plan and recorded the results and presented the findings back to him three weeks later. He was incensed as I went through my findings and his frustration boiled over as he snapped his pencil. My recommendation was that this was not a software we should implement. Inevitably, he went to the COO to convince him otherwise but the COO I think also had the same doubts and supported me. I heard later that this company went of business a couple of years later.

Months later we got a visit from a re-seller of Triton III from Baan. As a reseller, Agility were looking for a foothold in the UK ERP market and agreed after some considerable hard-bargaining from the COO they virtually provided us the software for free. We would pay for the implemetation consultancy, hardware and support. In hindsight, this was a stroke of luck, we were buying in to what was fast becoming a major player in the ERP space and it afforded me the opportunity to learn and administer the application using far more sophisticated tools that we had hitherto been used to.

It was also my first introduction to an implmentation methodology. Implementation Methodologies come in all shape and sizes but most of the good ones cover the same basic components

• Diagnose: Develop a high level understanding of the benefits and impacts on implementing a system. e.g McKinsey's 7's
• Analyze: Understand your current processes (as-is) and develop new improved processes (to-be) and critically, develop a Gap Analysis between the two that might result in re-training, software customization etc
• Design and Develop: This takes the analysis from the conceptual to the detailed design and development to realize the requirements. The culmination of this phase is often a prototype that can be demonstrated to the stakeholders
• Deploment:Setting up the environment, developing documentation and training become the focus of this phase. Data Migration and Customization development, if required will also be implemented here.
• Operation: The Go Live strategy can encompass many different forms. Parallel running, phased or a complete cut over
• Optimization: On going improvement is often dificult to achieve as resourses and investment are diverted elsewhere but it is important to avoid the cost of failure and reimplementation in the years to come.

I was made the Project Manager (and sole implementor)with the help of the ERP consultants. Even our small IT department was barely involved and no showed little interest. However, the small IBM RisC mini-computer next to my desk was now replaced with a server housed in a new converted Computer Room. The objectives of the Baan ERP implementation were to maintain the gains of a computerized Purchasing and Inventory Control System and extend it to Production Control, Finance and eventually Sales. The results were moderately successful. Bill of Material, Routings were added to the database. Relyon implemented Product Revision Control and Maintenance and implemented it alongside Autocad. It was particularly successful in the Special Products department that I had joined. We were able to generate and cost bills of material for our custom product range it a fraction of the time. I also implemented Baan in the AR, AP departments at Relyon and also its subsidiaries, Pritex and Solent Furniture. The Baan software was extremely flexible, functionally rich and easy to administer but it was also extremely buggy in its early days and Baan did not provide good support and its consultants lacked experience. As Baan grew, especially after winning the Boeing Contract it decided that small customers like Relyon did not provide the revenue stream that larger potential customers could and virtually withdrew all support forcing Relyon to look for an alternative ERP system.

1995-1996 A Step Back - Implementing Infoflo ERP

Given my familarity with the ERP system I was seemingly working for everyone and no one at the same time. I was responsible for closing the fiscal month, producing the financial and inventory reports and reconciliation. I maintained BOMs and Routings as well as administering the application itself. Eventually I was absorbed into the IT Department. Until now I had not considered myself IT, only an exploiter of IT technology. My two IT colleagues had a 'lock down' on the cobol-written sales order program that they had written and on which their livelihoods depended. I was never successful replacing their customized programs with the ERP system.

1995 was spent travelling the country seeing demo's of the many ERP Applications on the market. The likes of SAP, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft was out of our price range. The middle market was well served with new applications most of which performed poorly and would eventually go out of business or get incorporated in a competitor's portfolio.

We selected the best of a bad bunch and implemented Interactive's Infoflo. Although the implementation went smoothly, there was no appetite to really implement the full suite of software beyong what had been achieved with Baan and I sensed that progress, implementation-wise as well as my career at Relyon was beginning to stall.

The contacts I had made at various Baan user group meetings during led to chance call from a recrutiment consultants looking for Baan implementors in the Asia Pacific region. One month later I was on a plane to Singapore. I had not achieved everything I wanted to do at Relyon but it was overall a successful role which provided me much-needed experience and breadth.