December 2009

We have recently been working with SMAS (the Scottish Manufacturing Advisory Service -  in association with Scottish Enterprise), the main public sector information provider for manufacturing companies - with expert manufacturing specialists providing troubleshooting across a wide range of technologies and industrial sectors. SMAS is designed to help manufacturing SME’s (small to medium sized businesses) streamline their processes, reduce wastage, and become more efficient to generally improve their business.

Over the past 8 weeks we have had weekly training sessions with Colin Allan ,our SMAS practitioner, where we concentrated on learning more about Lean Awareness, Lean Principal Wastes* and improvement tools, such as process mapping, that we could use to enhance our performance throughout all stages of our operations, from sales through to planning through to despatch…..

* Lean manufacturing is the optimal way of producing goods through the removal of waste and implementing flow in your business processes – as waste is eliminated quality improves and production time and costs are reduced.

The SMAS course has been incredibly beneficial to us and we now have a much better understanding of our operations process. This increased understanding is made possible through process mapping and the introduction of a robust tracking system, allowing us to monitor and perform the necessary processes to optimum effect, to deliver the best service to all of our customers.