Sydney – Character Cabinets and Stone with Character, part of the Character Group, a leading WA-based suppliers of cabinetry and stone benchtop products to the new building construction and home renovation market, has selected Promapp cloud-based process management software to underpin continuous improvement within the business.

The Character Group has over 20 years’ experience in the West Australian housing and renovation scene and aims to exceed customer expectations by consistently delivering quality products on time and providing real value for money. As part of this strategy, the company strives to improve the clarity, accessibility and consistent execution of processes across the business and has in recent years embedded a culture of continuous improvement among its employees.

Historically, the Character Group has captured its value stream processes and standard work in Excel and Visio in order to support the manufacture and delivery of its custom made kitchens, bathrooms, laundries and stone benchtops.

However, with a major focus on driving innovation, remaining competitive and providing the highest quality manufacturing in the industry, the company decided to deploy lean management principles across its operations.

“We quickly identified that though we had excellent technology and people, our processes were not getting the attention they deserved to take us to another level in supporting both efficiency and company growth,” says Daniel Giles, Lean Operations Facilitator, Character Group.

“Following extensive evaluation, we realised that a solution such as Promapp could help us manage our knowledge and support a drive for continuous improvement so that our customers ultimately wouldn’t consider going anywhere else.”

Promapp will help the Character Group to standardise production to one piece flow throughout its operations, enabling the company to effectively manage customer leads, shorten production times, speed up invoicing and improve cash flow.

One piece flow lean management enables manufacturers to replace batch sizes and lot productions with working on one product at a time, enabling the company to reduce potential waste in overproduction, space, inventory, transportation and human capital.

Lead times for orders will also reduce giving the company more time to react to new tenders. In addition, staff members throughout the organisation from the manufacturing floor to the back office can receive immediate feedback on their work through documented processes held within Promapp. This will give everybody ownership in the production cycle, improving employee morale as well as identifying and prioritising problems as they arise.

“Promapp can capture cycle times and help us to make changes on the fly in Lean operations. It will also reduce waste on processes where we might have previously had double handling of everything from component orders to physical manufacturing to invoicing and reporting. Another benefit is that Promapp is cloud-based business process management software so any employee, anywhere, any time will be able to view the processes whilst in the field,” says Daniel.

Character Cabinets estimates that it will see a 20 per cent improvement in value added time throughout the business by mid-2016. This will enable the organisation to increase its job capacity and become more competitive with tenders through improved efficiency in response and job completion.
Promapp will be deployed in a staged rollout in the next few months enabling different process owners in the business, including production, finance, HR, inventory and procurement, to effectively input their processes.

“To support our focus on Lean, everyone in the business is undertaking a qualification in competitive manufacturing. Moving forward, we will see a step change in the business with added flexibility to effectively scale to capacity. Promapp will also help standardise processes for onboarding new people, training and customer service. We’ve been impressed with the simplicity and usability of Promapp. It has the ability to gel to whatever sized task you are dealing with,” says Daniel.

Established in 2002, Promapp Solutions works with hundreds of organisations worldwide to foster a thriving business improvement and process management culture.

The company’s Promapp proprietary software is a web-based application that makes it easy to create, navigate, share and change business processes. It provides an intuitive online process repository, an integrated process mapping tool and a process improvement toolset.

Australian customers are both public and private sector organisations including: Coca-Cola Amatil, Lumo Energy, Toyota Financial Services, Department of Justice, Victoria, WesTrac, Health Insurance Fund of Australia, City of Karratha and City of Greater Geraldton.

The company is headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand.