Interface Precision Engineering Limited (IPEL)

Interface Precision Engineering Limited (IPEL) is a specialist sub-contract precision manufacturer based in East Sussex. IPEL has gained a reputation for supplying precision machined, fabricated, and pressed components to sectors such as, the Science, Oil & Gas, Aerospace and Automotive sectors. Being situated in a predominantly Scientific Research & Vacuum manufacturing region of the UK, IPEL’s unrivalled reputation has been built around its combined 40 years’ proven experience of producing high quality machined components. Be it a one-off prototype or large batch production runs; from Standard CF & KF flange’s to fully assembled Fabrication’s & Chambers.

The Challenge

The company grew very rapidly over the last 6 years. Going from a turnover of approximately £1.1m to £2.4 million created an exponential 500% increase in the number of works orders that needed to be managed through the business. This meant that balancing and tracking progress of jobs manually became unmanageable, as operations director Lee Parnell explains:

After researching potential solutions, Seiki’s advanced planning and scheduling software was quickly selected. One of the key reasons being its drag-and-drop feature, which made it easy to move work around or reflect a change in capacity (such as an operator going off sick or a machine breakdown) and instantly see the impact of changes across the entire workload. Seiki also had a lot of experience of interfacing to the company’s existing Progress Plus ERP system.

Another period of rapid growth followed, almost doubling the volume of works orders going through the business. The decision was taken to create a dedicated production planner role. It had become clear that to get the full benefit from the Seiki Scheduler and to get it working how Interface wanted for the business, it needed someone to take ownership of and responsibility for using it internally. With his experience of using the company’s Progress Plus ERP system, Adam was the ideal candidate. He then worked with Seiki to smooth out any issues and refine the system configuration.

Communicating the schedule to the shopfloor team was previously done via planning display boards with paper copies of works orders. Adam and production manager Steve suggested that going paperless should be the next phase of their digital transformation to overcome the challenge of reflecting any changes made in the Scheduler “in the physical world”. At the time, it was a time consuming and expensive process that was effectively doing the same job twice.

Across all works orders, over 2,250 sheets of paper were being printed and issued to the shopfloor each month. These would do the journey around the shopfloor, with information being handwritten on, before returning to the office for review.  Any information that had been added then needed to be manually entered into systems before the documents were shredded. All a costly distraction from value adding activities that IPEL’s highly experienced team could’ve been spending time on.

Adapting to and embracing new technologies can present some challenges but the shopfloor team very quickly picked up the software, is fully engaged and it’s already becoming second nature to book onto jobs and send operations to First Off Inspection in Seiki AIR. And the way they use the system continues to evolve, from not only receiving but to capturing enriched production information. For example, attaching photographs and entering comments against operations to relay useful insights about the job, material etc, to other operators or members of the team. Insights that may otherwise have been lost in a conversation but have now become an essential part of the production record.

Working with Seiki

Lee Parnell says, “We made our decision to run our workshop, through Seiki software. It’s vital to us and just has to work. Because of that we need to be able to pick up the phone to our supplier. What we like about Seiki is that it understands the needs of SMEs and is responsive to those requirements.”