Environmental Efficiency has Economic Benefits...

...Envirowise can help you to find out how to improve your company's performance

Envirowise is a DTI-DEFRA joint programme which provides practical free advice to help UK industry cut costs and environmental impacts. Its advice is designed to have a rapid impact and many recommended measures pay back in days or weeks.

Envirowise monitoring and training materials can help you find the hidden costs in your process and help you train your staff to beat them down.

Because in current markets, even a successful and switched on manufacturing firm has to focus on day to day business pressures and may have no spare time to research and develop its own improvement materials and programmes. Envirowise has used top industry experts to produce its guidance ­ so you can save your valuable time and get the benefits of their experience for free.

What Can Envirowise do for YOU?

Envirowise has developed a range of resources, which can help manufacturers to tackle the issue of hidden waste in their production by:

  • Benchmarking their performance on First Time Yield and waste
  • Carrying out a self-assessment of their operations and target
    areas for cost effective improvement
  • Implementing Environmental Management Systems designed to manage waste downwards
  • A range of case studies and good practice guides are available to deliver this help.

If you want more information on how Envirowise can help you, then contact the Envirowise Helpline on 0800 585794 (during working hours) or visit www.envirowise.gov.uk

Do you have time to monitor yield?

How much of your costly raw material is sold as actual product?
How much do yield losses cost your firm?
Why do you need external advice?

  Fulleon Ltd designs and manufactures elements for fire alarm systems. To maintain its position in a highly competitive market, Fulleon is committed to continual improvement to reduce manufacturing costs and to enhance the functionality of its products.

Fulleon recognised that significant costs savings could be achieved by applying the cleaner design approach pioneered by Envirowise. (Cleaner design means fulfilling the customer’s requirements using the minimum amout of resources and creating the minimum amount of pollution at each stage of the product's life cycle.)

A cross-functional product development team was set up to research, design and develop the product — it included representatives from purchasing, production, quality, marketing, environment and HSE. Fulleon believes this was key to the success of the project and significantly reduced product development time.

The new design has significant advantages over the old design:

  • Reduced number of parts by 35%
  • Reduced plastic consumption by 27%
  • Reduced machine cycle times
  • Reduced assembly time by 35%
  • Improved functionality
  • Reduced packaging costs by 24% by changing from cardboard to plastic.

The saving in material, labour and energy costs has resulted in a overall saving of £92,650 a year. The cost of implementation was £97,000.00 — largely because of the cost of new tooling — the project payback period was just over a year.

The environmental benefits are concurrent to the economic advantages:

  • reduced raw material consumption
  • reduced energy use
  • reduced use of cardboard packaging
  • reduced transport costs for materials and products
  • less waste at the end of the product's life.

Being the first company in the world to gain certification to a new European standard for Fire Alarm systems that was published in 2001 has enabled Fulleon to steal a considerable market lead over its competitors.

 

  

 

  

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