Case Study – Whitecroft Lighting: PreBilt™
Key Takeaways
⇨ Whitecroft Lighting transformed its operations by implementing PreBilt™, a mobile solution that digitized manual warehouse processes, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.
⇨ The new system significantly improved customer experience through increased inventory accuracy, quicker dispatch times, and end-to-end traceability.
⇨ Real-time visibility of stock within SAP was achieved, allowing for better resource allocation and reduction of bottlenecks in production.
Whitecroft Lighting: PreBilt™
“The introduction of PreBilt has transformed our operation. This was a big cultural change for us after operating with manual processes for so many years, but the user-friendly screens with PreBilt really aided that transition.”
Danielle Howarth, Business Project Manager at Whitecroft
About Whitecroft Lighting
Whitecroft Lighting is one of the UK’s largest manufacturers of commercial lighting, providing tailored lighting solutions for commercial, industrial, healthcare and education applications. Whitecroft Lighting has 370 employees, an annual turnover of £55m and undertakes all R&D, product design and manufacturing in its headquarters and neighbouring 10,000sqm manufacturing facility.
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Project Benefits
- Enhanced customer experience.
- Increased inventory and picking accuracy.
- Quicker dispatch times.
- End-to-end traceability.
The Challenge
Whitecroft Lighting operates a central production and warehouse facility, which comprises receipt and storage of raw materials, production and storage of finished goods and dispatch to customers.
Operating SAP Warehouse Management (WM) within its facility, all processes were completed manually, with warehouse operatives managing tasks using paperwork and then manually entering data into SAP at a central desktop in the office.
As part of its continuous improvement programme, Whitecroft was looking to digitise its end-to-end warehouse processes to achieve real-time visibility of all stock within SAP and remove risk of human error, while improving efficiency, accuracy and customer experience.
The Solution
The Config Team implemented PreBilt™, powered by Neptune, a configurable mobile solution for the SAP supply chain, to manage stock movements within the facility. Configuring the solution to meet the specific customer needs, PreBilt was deployed to manage a range of processes including goods receipt, putaway, staging for production, picking, packing and loading.
The new mobile solution allows users to carry out end-to-end supply chain activities from a mobile device, with the transactions directly updated in SAP in real-time. Teams now have live up-to-date visibility of all stock in the warehouse, significantly improving picking accuracy. The team is also utilising the image capture functionality to take photos of orders as they are loaded onto the vehicle, which are then attached to the delivery note for a complete audit trail.
Operating a Just-in-Time approach to delivering materials for production, the manufacturer was looking to improve productivity and reduce downtime in waiting for materials. The Config Team configured its Supply Chain Reporting solution, which enables key information to be displayed on large wallboards in the production area. The live data feed provides real-time visibility of the status of all orders, enabling the reallocation of resource to busy areas, ensuring there are no bottlenecks slowing down production.
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