What pandemic?

Control of its foiling process and supplying product from stock has supported Deceuninck in successfully navigating its way through the worst of this year’s challenges. Operations director Darren Woodcock explains.

We got caught out by the ink shortage in Europe: there was some shortage in Europe and all the systems houses were hit so we couldn’t get our usual protective tape, but I think that’s it.

And that’s something, given the disruption that other fabricators have seen to their supply chain in the last two years, that Deceuninck customers will probably forgive us for.

Deceuninck has come through Covid and the ensuing supply chain disruption comparatively unscathed. Our otif did temporarily drop from 97% to 90% but in the context of the market as a whole, we remained streaks ahead of our competitors.

There was never really a shortage of materials. You just had to have the relationships with your suppliers and be prepared to pay for them. There have been some things that we couldn’t control – staff sickness, Covid – but what we could control and manage through effective planning, we did.

Our master stroke has been our approach to how we set up our foiling operation, and the decision to supply more than 30 different colourways from stock.

This gave us a cushion, allowing us to keep up with demand while our online ordering system, Deceuninck Online, gave real time visibility of demand, with a replacement stock order automatically generated as each customer order rolled in.

We’d removed the middle-man. We went from not having a single foiling line in 2015 to being fully operational by September 2016 with six.

This decision wasn’t based on a prophetic vision that Covid and supply chain chaos would be lurking around the corner, but a more fundamental conviction that by owning process, in reducing time and motion, we could deliver a more flexible service to our customers.

Suddenly we weren’t sending product to the Midlands to be foiled. All that time in transport came back to us and allowed us to be more agile in how we deliver.

The other thing that worked for us is that we don’t have a huge product range. We operate on a rotational basis and know what we need to be running through the foiling lines and when.

Now running six foiling lines, each is geared to a specific product type: small profiles; main frames; a quick-change line; a double-sided line; a line dedicated to single lengths (a get-us-out-of-a-fix line); and a fully automatic line.

The latter, a state-of-the-art Luna R machine, represents the latest in a series of six figure investments on manufacturing capacity by Deceuninck.

Capable of processing highly complex profiles, the Luna R is at the cutting edge of lamination technology. Delivering exceptional quality of finished product, it enhances our market leading colour offering, providing us with additional flexibility to respond to increasing levels of demand for foils, and giving us capacity to foil more than one million linear metres of foiled products a month.

With our investment in process, we’ve based our operational model on increased stockholding rather than just-in-time manufacture.

We hold more product in stock, but that can vary from say 10 stillages for one foil to half a stillage for another. We understand and we track demand very closely. And because we have real time visibility of what’s going out of the door, we know what we need to replace and when.

We always hold part-finished product in stock so if someone does come in with something we don’t have, we don’t have to extrude it, which is where lead times can become much longer.

This year, we’ve controlled what we can control, accepted and worked around what we can’t, and come through things very effectively as a team.