ENI Engineering Ltd is a contract manufacturing business specialising in metal fabrication, powder coating and assembly. When I joined the business in 2017, ENI was using an in-house developed job card system based on a Microsoft Access database. The system was fit for purpose and contained all relevant information for the business to assess things like job costing, productivity and rework. The system generated reports weren’t very useful and didn’t go far enough to make good decisions. Over the years we spent a lot of time on data cleansing and ensuring the data was kept tidy so it could be used for analysis. Using a database connection in Microsoft Excel I was able to prepare all sorts of reports like job profitability against target, rework costs by reason and area, productivity reports, DIFOT….the possibilities were huge and my efforts culminated in the establishment of monthly reporting on all job cards by customer and aligning the job costs to profit and loss with accuracy of close to 100%. For the first time the business had real insights to where their profits were coming from – this started a continuous focus on targeted manufacturing improvements, customer negotiations and sales strategies. The business knew exactly what to focus on to increase profitability.

Since the old system was outdated, not supported by Office 365 and was starting to hold the growing business back we decided to look for an ERP solution that would allow us to have just one system with better information on our fingertips and remove a whole lot of manual data entry. I took the lead of this project and together with our consultant we went through a thorough selection process and ended up with an American solution that had no New Zealand representation. The limited remote support required us to take matters more into our own hands than we would have expected. But we knew our business well, tested every element of the system thoroughly and rolled it out module by module until going live after just 4 months of prep. Testing and reality were two different things and an unresolved customised integration of another software package meant a turbulent first 2 months. But the whole team showed great attitude and quickly found their feet with the new system. I acquired SQL scripting skills and created dashboards with the inbuilt dashboarding software – this was a game changer for the organisation as now decision makers at all levels had powerful and detailed LIVE information at their finger tips. This ranged from Order Intake, DIFOT in Spec, productivity by work center to Quality Control. With the new software the possibilities are sheer endless and the business is better for it.

Whilst the ERP implementation was an extremely challenging experience, I realised that analysing data and providing insights to help people making good decisions was deeply in my passion. I approached John Down, the owner and managing director of ENI Engineering, and proposed to permanently backfill my role and reduce my involvement at ENI so I could solely focus on business analysis at ENI and other businesses. John saw the increased value for ENI and together with the board agreed to my proposition. I remain part of the Senior Leadership Team and attend regular board meetings.

Since late February 2021 I have been involved with Good Honest Products, a wholesale bakery based in Wigram, Christchurch. Their business model has been centred around fresh breads and sweet treats delivered to Christchurch cafes and restaurants. But in addition to that Good Honest is branching out more and more to supply frozen breads and sweet treats nationwide and has experienced tremendous growth in the national Foodservice but also Supermarket and Retail segments.

Like with most businesses, growth provides new challenges and their ERP system which was catered for the Fresh Delivery side only hasn’t coped well with inventory control and production planning for make to stock items. I have been engaged to perform a complete systems review, which included a whole lot of data cleansing and management. In the process of the review we decided to keep the good part of the ERP and develop a production plan with multi site inventory management in Excel which is being used daily and is being further refined as the business needs develop.

I also headed up a full recipe review to establish accurate costings for all existing products. In that process it was decided that I would take over the month end management accounts to improve the financial reporting for both management and externals, but also to establish KPIs so we know what margins to target. The company now has full clarity and visibility of what makes them money and what doesn’t.

The business is very dynamic and I continue to assist with system developments, implementations and maintenance whilst looking after the finance function. – basically doing everything I can to help Good Honest on its amazing journey.