Crosby Kitchens
Leading manufacturer of quality kitchens
Company Overview
In the fiercely competitive marketplace for kitchens, businesses are vying for a share of a market with single-digit growth. Sheffield-based manufacturer Crosby Kitchens, however, is stealing a march on its competitors. It has enjoyed 20 per cent growth over the past year and the business now has the capability to improve its position even further in the future.
Crosby Kitchens Ltd was set up 10 years ago in its current guise, but the brand history goes back much further than that: the original Crosby business was established 70 years ago. In the early 1990s, its parent group sold the kitchens business to a competitor; the firm decided to consolidate the operation with its own, leading to closure of Crosby’s Sheffield factory and redundancy for its workforce. That was 1996 and Crosby’s former Finance Director Mike Atkin, himself one of the redundancies, chose to join forces with three colleagues to form a new business, Athena Kitchens.“We scraped together the funds to kit out our new factory with some machines and we started making cabinets for some of the old Crosby customers,” recalls Mike. For the first three or four years, Mike and his colleagues developed a successful small business in this way, then six years ago it was to change again,“We had a call from the previous owner who asked us if we wanted to buy the Crosby name.” It wasn’t a tough decision – the Crosby brand is well known and established in the kitchen industry.“So in 2000,we bought some of its stock and the name, and established a new company, Crosby Kitchens Ltd,” explains Mike. Now his 65-employee operation has two divisions:Athena, the manufacturing business, which counts Crosby as its largest customer; and Crosby, which acts as the sales and marketing operation for its own range of kitchens.
System Overhaul
Crosby’s routes to market are not straightforward. Some of its products go to the high street kitchen retailers via two main distributors in England, to which it sells in bulk; others go to house builders in Scotland through a distribution arrangement with builders’ merchants.
Both the retail and the new build markets certainly keep the company busy, but the time came when Crosby knew that it needed to overhaul its systems if the business was to have a solid base from which to progress further.
Mike explains, “We really had very little information for the factory.The shopfloor was being run on spreadsheets and this meant we had no clear view of the work in there.We needed a manufacturing system to help us secure more control and more visibility.” What’s more, data often had to be rekeyed two or three times throughout the course of an order – this took time and often led to errors.
After evaluation, Crosby selected Access Supply Chain.“We were already using theAccess Dimensions accounting software for all the ledgers and we were very pleased with that,” says Mike.“We did test Access against others, including Sage Line 500, and it competed very well in all aspects of functionality and it was very competitively priced.What tipped the balance for us, however, was that with Access, integration was simple: we could continue using the finance software and just move forward seamlessly with the manufacturing system.”
Once a plan had been devised, the process of implementation began and the Access Supply Chain solution soon went live. The relationship between the people at Crosby and Access served to ease the transition with the new system. “We get on very well with their people.Their service is excellent – when you call them with a problem, their telephone support is very good indeed.”
Previous experience taught Mike that implementations invariably have hiccups, but in this case, he says, “it went very smoothly”. He adds,“You always want more time to test the pilot system but there comes a point when you have to jump in.” Crosby encountered no problems with its people in terms of buying in to the new software: everyone could see the immediate benefits in terms of bringing a new, more controlled, way of working to the business.“Previously, many staff worked late at night and early in the mornings just to create the documentation that we needed for deliveries,” says Mike. Now, he says, the business growth speaks volumes.
“We’ve increased sales by 20 per cent in the last year – before Access Supply Chain, we would have really struggled to keep up with any amount of new business.We were constantly firefighting and troubleshooting to get work processed as fast as possible. Now, we’ve got the same workforce and we’ve taken this 20 per cent increase in our stride.We are more effective, we have more visibility and ultimately more control.”
Sales order processing is faster and more accurate.“We have so much more visibility of what orders are coming in and how we can best respond to them,” says Mike.“We have information on how we can pick orders, how to consolidate them into one picking sheet, and this has helped tremendously.A 20 per cent increase in business means 20 per cent more orders to be picked and 20 per cent more products to be delivered - without a doubt, the new system has helped us to achieve this.”
Access Supply Chain has also brought benefits to Crosby’s purchasing department.“Before, it was a bit of a finger in the air job,” admits Mike.“Now, we work on a three to four week lead time, but our purchaser can see immediately what we will need and can order the right mix of components. It’s helped enormously.”
Future Plans
Now that Crosby has control of the factory and other areas, the next step is to complete a project to give an accurate bill of materials for every one of its 1,500 products. Mike explains,“Take something simple like a sink unit: each has various panel options plus a plinth, hinges, screws, and so on.” Multiply that by the total number of products and it’s not hard to see where the opportunities for error were – and why unforeseen stockouts were a regular occurrence.Once this functionality is fully implemented, everything will be controlled from one central system instead of from disparate spreadsheets and individuals’ memories. Currently, Crosby is populating the system with the necessary data – no mean feat. “It’s time consuming to establish all the bills of materials for all the different products,” says Mike. “It’s not a static product range either: kitchens are very much a fashion item and this means we need to launch five or six new ranges a year.”
But the effort will pay off when Crosby is in a position to go live with bills of materials shortly for all its product lines. “We know that once it is fully up and running, it will help us unlock even more benefit from the manufacturing system, plus we will cut down on inventory and speed up our lead times.” A prosperous future certainly seems to be on the cards for Crosby Kitchens.And its new system and procedures are giving it a sharper edge that it lacked previously. Everyone has all the data they need at the touch of a button. “It’s brought us total clarity,” says Mike.
“We can all look forward and we know we are planning effectively for the future.”
