To all concerned

Dear,

Galvacoat/Steelcoat and Metalix offer a wide range of possibilities for surface treatment of materials. The history of our companies goes back to the late 1960s and since then we have grown into one of the larger surface treatment companies in the Benelux. We were interested in optimizing our production, logistics, and administration and thought it would be a good idea to work with Vocum as an external partner for this. In these departments, at the start of the collaboration with Vocum, 88 FTEs were active.

During the analysis, Vocum determined that a potential saving of €791,415 was possible within the above scope. This corresponds to a productivity improvement of 25%.

Thanks to a number of structural and far-reaching changes, the Vocum project team quickly achieved results. We have summarized the most important ones below:

• Administrative tasks have been centralized so that duplicate work is avoided and employees can take over each other’s tasks. This benefits the continuity of production because there is now a clear flow of orders, allowing for smarter scheduling.
• Production schedules were developed, allowing smarter planning, resulting in fewer changeover times and thus higher productivity. These schedules are on the internal network and accessible to everyone, which has reduced internal phone traffic regarding planning and allows the production manager to focus more on productivity and efficiency in his halls.
• Personnel schedules were developed, based on realistic standards and predicted workload—one for Metalix with 5 production units and one for Steelcoat with 2 production units. Through personnel scheduling, supervisors have become very cost-conscious when scheduling staff, which has a direct effect on productivity.
• A new communication structure with an accompanying reporting system was implemented so that the right information reaches the right person at the right time, and corrective action can be taken at the proper hierarchical level.
• The organizational structure in production was adjusted so that there is always one leading force and point of contact in the hall. For this purpose, team leaders were appointed and given responsibility. These supervisors were trained both in class and on the job in managing people and in “management by objectives.” This enables them to manage their teams better, follow up, and work proactively. The production managers were involved in these trainings to improve their own leadership and to better supervise the team leaders.

The above points and the continuous guidance of the Vocum team enabled us to achieve the target of €791,451 on an annual basis after 2/3 of the project (after 13 calendar weeks out of a total of 20 calendar weeks).

Ultimately, the target was even exceeded and a total annual saving of €1,275,687 was achieved. This equates to a productivity increase of 37% at Steelcoat and a productivity increase of 33% at Metalix. This corresponds to an ROI of 4:1. The agreed minimum guarantee of 1:1 was achieved from week 6 of the project.

After an analysis by Vocum, our assumption was confirmed that we could work much more efficiently in our departments. Through a thorough project approach and tight management on both Vocum’s side and ours, it was possible to show a strong improvement in productivity in a short period of time. Initially, our employees were skeptical about feasibility because they thought delivery times would be jeopardized. But by working more efficiently and addressing the improvement points one by one with an action plan, we quickly achieved our goals. It should also be mentioned that Vocum succeeded in convincing the supervisors in our production, administration, and logistics departments of their approach in a short time. Through their enthusiasm and persuasiveness, a sense quickly arose that the proposed improvements could indeed be realized. Every week, a short meeting was held on progress and action points were discussed. This way of working greatly contributed to the speed of the project. We were—and still are—able to make quick adjustments when necessary.

We are pleased with the way Vocum successfully completed the project and recommend Vocum to any company that has a change process with measurable results in mind.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Kempeneers
Director Steelcoat Galvacoat Metalix

Luc Segers
Head of Finance Steelcoat Galvacoat Metalix