Relyon Beds
Relyon's Recent History
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 installtion through to CCTV. It became clear that without any synergies between the acquisitions, lack of top management expertise and 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 the size to exploit economies of scale to reduce costs and increase reach in an increasingly cost-conscious yet quality-seeking consumer market. Inevitable, in 2001, the group 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
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 a 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 they would do. I was placed in the Special Projects department with an elderly colleague coastly quickly to retirement as my manager. Perhaps 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 retieved from a database of inventory of parts, suppliers and prices printed from the system saved a great deal of time, and looked professional.
Better still, purchasing until now had no visibility of inventories execept from a weekly update 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 application.
1991-1994 Implementing Baan ERP
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. The 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 in the open plan office grew louder and louder to the point where heads started to appear above screens and people asked if everthing was all right. At one point he snapped his pencil as this 'young kid' as he saw it quietly demolished his application. 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.
Months later we got a visit from a re-seller Triton III from Baan. They were looking for a foothold in the market and agreed after some considerable hard-bargaining from the COO to virtually provide 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.
The ERP implementation was still largely conducted by myself with the help of the ERP consultants. Even the small IT department was barely involved. However, the small IBM Risk mini-computer next to my desk was now replaced with a server housed in a new constructed Data Center.
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.
