Background
Angel Forest is a wood-products company that imports large volumes of dried timber and processes it for resale to customers according to their requirements. Processing might be as simple as cross-cutting to length or sawing to the right width, or more complex operations such as treatment or packing to prefab-home requirements.
Traceability is key to the whole business because of forest certification and sustainability requirements. Wood is received, stored and processed in packs, each pack with a unique id.
"Our objective was to have a high-speed, heavily automated operation so that we could keep our own costs down. This is what we achieved with Manu Online."
— Paul Walker, IT Manager, Angel Forest
Manu Online worked together with Angel Forest to build an automated system to receive and process wood packs in high volumes.
Barcoding was used extensively, both on incoming and processed packs and to help with yard operations. Labels are printed with automation during receipt and after machine processing when the product ids are changed to reflect created materials.
As packs are processed, every produced pack could be different due to sizing and scrap quantities. Labels are printed to match the exact resulting materials in a pack.
Challenges
High-volume receipting, custom processing and full pack-level traceability all had to work together at speed — no manual workarounds, no lost packs, no broken chain of custody for certification audits.
Implementation
The Multi-Company Edition of Manu Online was chosen because importing of goods was done under a separate trading company. Some consignment goods are also kept in the name of a supplier's company.
Main features of the project
- Custom tools for high-volume receipting of incoming materials with traceability.
- Custom tools for high-volume label printing of customised packs coming from the machines.
- Yard-management tools for moving packs to and from order-processing lines.
- Reporting systems using PowerBI on an external reporting database.
- Tools for the sales team to request packs for certain customers at sales time, so that customers could get exactly what they required.
Manu Online worked with a local partner Think Cloud Ltd, who provided the specific hardware for networking and barcode reading and scanning. Think Cloud was able to set up the complex structure of the process — involving over 5,000 line items — and also manage the design code of the label reports.
Results — what Angel Forest achieved
- Stock control and location control across large sites
- Traceability for sustainability certification throughout the processes
- Custom throughput for processing of wood packs
- Ramping from a start-up to more than 300 packs a day in a short period
- Eliminating manual processes and reducing errors, with real-time visibility for faster, better decisions
The Manu Online system has been designed to improve accuracy and speed, making it easy for users to create meaningful reports quickly from the large amount of data stored in the system.
Manu Online Multi-Company Edition allows you to have one single, global system to manage your sales, inventory, manufacturing, procurement and invoicing. This system connects to small-company cloud accounts systems supported in our countries of operation.
How Manu Online assisted
Manu Online worked together with Angel Forest to implement a system that provides extensive support for barcoding in manufacturing and yard operations, support for customised processing of their materials in production, connection to PowerBI reporting and other functions — all the requirements that were needed to make a successful ERP implementation.
Update February 2023: Angel Forest's business concept was based on importing raw materials from Russia. Due to the lack of materials, the company entered administration and their operations ceased.
