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Cogent Technology Boosts Efficiency With ERP System

K3 Business Technology's MFW Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is helping contract electronics manufacturer Cogent Technology to satisfy increasing demands from customers as they come under intense competitive pressures.

Managing Director Nigel Slator explains: "The economic climate has put electronics companies under extreme pressure, and this in turn has fed down to specialist contractors like ourselves. As well as ongoing cost pressures, our batch sizes have dropped from a typical 500 to 200. In extreme cases we are called upon to produce batches of less than 10, causing serious set-up time implications. We also have to offer our customers a fast track service and much greater scheduling flexibility to meet their exact delivery requirements as events change. To cope with all these pressures and compete effectively we need all the help we can get from our IT system."

Based at Woodbridge, near Ipswich, Cogent Technology offers contract design and manufacturing facilities to electronics companies, typically in the low volume and high complexity areas. Its customers include blue chip companies in sectors such as instrumentation and control, specialist medical and the defence industry. The company has almost doubled its turnover in just three years.

Cogent has invested heavily in high precision placement machines - linked to a CAD system - test and calibration equipment and state-of-the-art technologies such as surface mount and BGA placement for providing more connections in high density components. The company has been awarded full ISO 9000 accreditation to 2000 standard.


An efficient IT system is needed to control and manage such complex manufacturing and test operations, particularly for increasing numbers of customers with large Bills of Materials (BOM). This was a key reason why Cogent upgraded to K3's latest MFW software.

Nigel Slator adds: "We receive sales orders from the customers, along with their BOM, and match up part and reference numbers, or create new ones, to generate our own BOM. This is used by MFW to drive everything from material requirements, buying lists and order scheduling through to creating despatch notes and invoices. MFW gives us very good visibility of where the orders are in the system, and it is easy to reschedule or pull forward orders that need expediting.

"Our management information is handled by the system's Crystal reports - some are standard reports and others have been specially written. They quickly highlight the things we really need. We are now looking into Alert Manager, which is a new MFW feature that helps to manage by exception."

Alert Manager is useful for automatically alerting staff about a whole host of exceptions, such as overdue works orders. This allows people to concentrated on things that matter rather than reading pages of reports and hoping to pick out the anomalies. It also reduces the incidence and cost of errors with "red flag" warnings delivered automatically by e-mail. Another important use is for automatically sending customers order status reports via the internet.

The company prides itself on keeping its customers well informed and maintaining regular dialogues with them, and Alert Manager will be extremely beneficial. Sales and Marketing Manager Bob Stainer says: "MFW gives me immediate access to the status of customer orders simply by using the part number, our order number or the customer's order number. I can also use the Crystal reporting facility to show the added value element of achieving order book fulfillment to generate the revenue required for the business."

With nearly 6,000 line items in stock, Cogent needs tight control of its stores and inventory. Material Requirements Planning (MRP) is run nightly to generate picking lists, which are around 10 pages long for a typical printed circuit board. MFW allows special instructions to be referenced at the goods received area on parts that are intrinsically safe, ie safety critical parts requiring 100% inspection. In this area, Shop Floor Data Capture is a key area for future development as most of the stock from distributors arrives already bar coded.