G&B Electronic Designs Ltd has made a significant investment in its future growth by purchasing a fully integrated manufacturing software solution from Manchester-based K3 Business Technology Group (K3).

The new £150,000 SYSPRO-based system will help the electronic contract design and manufacturing specialist treble the size of its business over the next three years by enabling it to establish high quality processes and gain full visibility of important management information throughout the company.

The system will include SYSPRO’s Finite Capacity Planning module to ensure that the shop floor will be fully resourced to meet customer orders and that estimating processes are both fast and accurate.

“This is a major upgrade to our current systems and it will lay a firm foundation for our business expansion plans. The electronics industry is beginning to show signs of recovery and we believe it is the right time to get everything ready to meet market expectations. This investment will benefit both ourselves and our customers as it will help our competitive edge. It will also make interfacing with our customer who currently run SYSPRO a lot more efficient with respect to set-up and time to market,” says George McBrown, Managing Director.

G&B is an existing K3 customer that now uses individual manufacturing, accounting and job costing systems and routines. This involves time-consuming manual tasks and creates opportunity for errors as data transfers from one system to another – much of this currently requires rekeying information from highly detailed spreadsheets into the database. The company will benefit quickly from bringing these individual elements into a single seamless, automated SYSPRO solution.

“Working with K3 for many years has meant that the company understands our requirements and has been able to tailor SYSPRO to suit our needs. Importantly, it will enable precision estimating of all jobs without needing to pore over complex spreadsheets and link each one carefully to ensure that we have costed each job accurately. SYSPRO will allow us to see that we have all costs correct, from components to the actual time taken for manufacturing each item. We’ll get an instant view of our capacity and resourcing at the touch of a button. This also results in accurate quotes and delivery windows, which help to keep our customers happy,” says George McBrown.

Formed in 1980, to offer electronic design services, G&B has a staff of almost 100 and offers a range of subcontract services to the electronics industry including Mechanical and PCB design, prototype and volume manufacturing including component procurement and test, CE marking and after sales service. The company has a wide range of customers in the military, medical device, industrial, broadcast and aerospace sectors.