The Organisation:
Reliance Precision Limited is a specialist engineering business that provides custom designed and built electro-mechanical assemblies and components to a wide range of customers and industry sectors worldwide. Their headquarters are in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire where much of their technical knowledge and manufacturing capability is based. Their key strength is their ability to translate customers' needs into precision engineered products and systems.
The Challenge:
Jon Plascott - the Head of Compliance at Reliance Precision Limited - knows that in order to keep the business at the forefront of its field, it needs to be exceptionally effective at managing the process of helping customers to bring new products to market through development, prototyping, and manufacturing. He saw that, although they were good at this aspect, they could be even better - and in the spirit of continual improvement which pervades the organisation, he wanted a significantly more effective process in the business. Recognising the value of external support, he called The Excellence Partnership to help.
The Approach:
The Company applied one of The Excellence Partnership's Improvement Frameworks to help develop a more effective process for introducing new products.
The approach took the business through the following steps:
- Understanding how the Company currently introduced new and existing products into manufacturing.
- Understanding the issues that existed with that current process.
- Developing a new process for the business to introduce new products.
- Creating a plan to move the organisation from the current to the new process.
- Implementing that plan.
- Reviewing the success of the project.
The Outcome:
The new process has now been implemented and this key part of the business is better understood, clearly documented, and more efficient.
Jon Plascott is delighted with the support given to Reliance by The Excellence Partnership team which challenged their thinking and helped to develop a powerful multi-disciplinary project team.
Jon said "New product introduction has to be done quickly and right first time. The techniques of APQP developed in the automotive sector are generally applicable to our aerospace and scientific instrumentation businesses and put us in a strong position to deliver customer satisfaction to higher and higher levels. "