Brother Industries (U.K.) Ltd is the Circular Technology Centre for the global Brother Group. Based in Ruabon, near Wrexham in North Wales, the site is the group’s specialist for remanufacturing, and it runs an in-house precision injection moulding and assembly operation. Components come in, remanufactured cartridges and moulded parts go out, and the dock sees steady traffic in both directions. For a while, all of that was planned on a whiteboard.
Scheduling lived on a whiteboard
The warehouse ran its loadings the way plenty of sites still do: a board on the wall, updated by hand.
A whiteboard is fine until you want to look back at what happened, share the plan with anyone not standing in front of it, or let a supplier see an open slot. It can’t do any of those.
Digitalising, one process at a time
The switch wasn’t triggered by a crisis. It came out of a company-wide push to work more digitally.
Scheduling was a sensible place to start: a daily manual process with an obvious digital replacement and no heavy IT setup needed to get going.
What changed on the dock
Day to day, the difference shows up in a few ways.
Three things stand out there. Suppliers now book their own slots through the booking portal, so the warehouse isn’t the middleman for every appointment. The team marks trucks in and out and moves times around live as the day changes. And for the first time there’s a record: loading data building up week after week that the site can look back on.
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