About the company
Established in 1919, Evans Vanodine is a family-owned manufacturer of cleaning and hygiene chemicals for the janitorial and livestock protection industries. Based just outside Preston in the northwest of England, Evans Vanodine produces 23 million liters of chemicals each year, ranging from products such as hand cleansers and high-performance floor polishes for the cleaning industry, to agricultural chemicals including livestock disinfectants, dairy hygiene solutions, and teat dips for farms.

As global demand for its products increased, Evans Vanodine built a new modern 100,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in the early 1980s at Walton Summit, just outside Preston. Having expanded the company further since then, it now operates from a five-acre site producing more than 1,600 different product lines and exporting to over 70 countries.

Setting the strategy
Like many process manufacturers, Evans Vanodine’s manufacturing and distribution operations are immensely complex. Its production facilities include 25 stainless steel, polythene, and pressurrized mixing vessels, with capacities of up to 14,000 liters. These facilities create a total of 1,600 product lines across a variety of pack sizes, styles, and label variants according to customers’ individual demands. This complexity is further exacerbated by Evans Vanodine’s "customer first" ethos.

“Our customers want product formulations that are unique and specific to them,” explains the Evans Vanodine IT director, Anthony Evans. “We deliver exactly what they need, which means constantly changing demands on our production and buying operations. In addition, some of our raw materials are sourced from Asia and the Far East, and therefore have some long lead times.

"So if we get our forecast or inventory wrong, it can affect our customer service as well as our margins.”

Faced with this challenge, the chemicals manufacturer decided to undertake a review of its processes. The outcome of this review was that its stock-led approach to manufacturing — whereby replenishment was undertaken routinely once materials for a particular product dropped below a certain point — was simply too unresponsive to customer needs and potentially expensive.

It was not sufficient to deliver the high levels of service required to remain competitive, particularly in light of globalization, and inventory levels were either too high or too low. Therefore, Evans Vanodine decided to switch to a customer-led model of manufacturing.

To support this, Evans Vanodine required a software solution that would facilitate a customer-led approach.

The solution needed to deliver precision forecasting to ensure the plant produced exactly the right levels of products and managed seasonal fluctuations, and, in doing so, lowered inventory, reduced waste, and delivered greater customer satisfaction.