Mulberry, the luxury fashion house, famous for its handbags contacted Exelin when they were looking to increase output from the factory in Chilcompton, Somerset, before investing in their new £7.5million Bridgwater based factory which opened in 2013. The existing factory had grown to the point where there was no further space for expansion.
Exelin worked with the Mulberry team to review the existing equipment layout, materials storage facilities and flow of materials in order to identify opportunities to free up space to add further manufacturing capacity. A new layout was implemented which significantly reduced work in progress, improved material flows and that created space for additional production line capacity.
Mulberry achieved a 60 per cent increase in line output taken as an average, four weeks prior to the project and four weeks after the project.
Follow-up audits have shown that these levels have been maintained and the same principles have been rolled out to other production lines by the on-site operations team.