Stock control, production planning and traceability program for small manufacturers reduces ledger entry times by 70% and brings full materials traceability within minutes.
Robot Stores, a new stock control, production planning and traceability program from Cambridge software company Resoco Limited, is set to bring 'big company' efficiencies to even the smallest manufacturer at an affordable price. Robot Stores has been created for use by those with limited computing skills. Users report becoming comfortable with the system within hours.

This is largely attributable to its unique on-screen flowchart representation of the manufacturing process.

All of the information about a particular batch - the customer, the order, the production, the subcontractor and delivery details - are all accessible from a single screen.

Clicking on the appropriate flow chart frame or arrow presents the user with a familiar form to fill in.

'We're engineers and machinists, not computer buffs,' says Chip Millins, managing partner of Sudbury Components, whose 12-person production engineering firm has been closely involved in the development of Robot Stores.

'What we needed was a tool that was easy for our staff to use, would give us the traceability our customers were demanding, and was not going put us in hock at the bank.

Robot Stores has achieved that and removed many of the pressures of day-to-day operations, giving me the opportunity to concentrate on managing the business.' East Anglian trials have indicated that the elimination of multiple paper ledgers by Robot Stores can bring time-savings of up to 70% in entering and retrieving data.

It also generates significant efficiencies in stock holding, production prioritisation and scheduling, and can meet ISO9000 traceability requirements in minutes.

Conservative estimates, based simply on time saved on data entry and retrieval, put a typical payback period of less than four months on a 3-user system, including training.

'In working with small manufacturers', says Resoco managing director Raf Storr, an experienced production engineer, 'I recognised that while there were any number of Materials Resource Planning (MRP) programs available, their complexity frightened the staff or their price tags frightened the management.' Such engineering enterprises are often family owned with fewer than 20 employees yet, according to Office for National Statistics (March 2001), they represent almost 166,000 (around 85%) of the UK's total manufacturing business sites.

Current sales efforts are focused on the metal forming industries, but the program is equally suited to other sectors including plastics, food processing and electronics - indeed anywhere that requires stock control and traceability.