Planning automation for Dennis Eagle

Colin Bean – Business Systems Analyst

Dennis Eagle manufacture refuse collection vehicles. These are the products that everybody sees around the towns and villages. All over the country, collecting their household waste.

Our products are built specifically to our customer requirements. So each vehicle that goes down our production line is unique to their requirements. That's down to a low entry cab. The body capabilities, the bin lift configuration. It's all down to what the customer wants.

Graham Heydon - Planning & Data Science Manager

Our Planning process at the moment is all done using Excel. That's not an appropriate medium for this scale of business. We want to get it onto a digital platform. So, we need to bring in some expertise again, to make a connection between the new tool and our Avante ERP software.

So the sales team notifies when they have an inquiry. We add a row to our spreadsheet that manages our order book. And then that information on a weekly basis is transferred across into Avante, using a manually triggered process.

So the proof of concept phase really is as completed. Its purpose was to make sure that we could control start and end times of works orders. In the new planning tool. And then send that data back to our Avante ERP system.

And that's worked, that has gotten us to the point where we can, kick off a real project to develop a full application. Well once we go live and have all our data in through a digital platform, it will enable us to build on that.

So our production monitoring system and other business applications should be able to be connected into them. So we can actually flow information right across the business.

It's always a pleasure. I think the summary, they're available, they're knowledgeable and they've helped us out no end. So, that's why we come back to them (Web Control).