Weir Minerals Africa is beginning to reap rich rewards from a two-year campaign implemented to transform the company’s relationship with its main suppliers from simply transactional associations into fully fledged strategic partnerships.

“Our objective has been to align these suppliers to our corporate Weir Production System to motivate them to manufacture products that are increasingly more cost effective and in line with our quality standards,” Wim van Vliet, Weir Minerals Africa’s supply chain director, says. “Feeding out of this is improved on-time delivery and stock management.

“Several long term initiatives have brought about this kind of enablement. One example is the introduction of bar code labels. Working capital is a key measure of our business and we’ve needed to optimise our inventory holding. To achieve this, we’ve enabled about 20 companies in our supplier base with the facility to download and print out bar code labels associated with the parts they manufacture for us.

“The key issue is that in order to prevent our suppliers from delivering these parts too early and in too large batches, they are only able to download and print a bar code label for a part when that part is due for delivery. This system has given us a lot more control over how and when we receive these components.”

Another initiative that has optimised the company’s inventory holding is its Just In Time (JIT) production strategy. For instance, Weir Minerals Africa’s fastener supplier holds all fastener stock on its premises and when pump parts are pulled into assembly on a specific day, the fastener parts are delivered on that same day.

“To further optimise our inventory holding, we’re also looking at consignment holding,” van Vliet continues. “This is a complex concept that is still under development, but in basic terms it means that we would hold stock on behalf of our suppliers on our premises and only pay for parts when they are consumed for production.

“We’ve made an enormous investment into building a Best In Practice warehouse at our Alrode site. In 2008 we were shipping an average of 2 500 parts a day; this has increased to 8 000 parts a day in 2013 – a dramatic velocity improvement. Rather than keeping all that inventory in stock, we’ve doubled our inventory turn rate since 2008.”

Another initiative has focused on the company’s logistics infrastructure – moving parts once they’ve been picked and despatched from the Alrode warehouse to the end customer as quickly as possible. In some cases, lead times have been reduced by 50%. For example, sending parts to customers in Zambia used to take two to three weeks, but today Weir Minerals Africa is able to get the parts to the customer in a week.

Parts are shipped to customers throughout Africa and van Vliet says the company has brought about substantial improvements by carrying out its own freight forwarding, using a dedicated outsourced internal freight forwarder operating from the company’s Alrode site. This effectively gives the company full control over the process.

“From a broader perspective, being a Best In Practice supplier isn’t just about being low cost at source,” he continues. “Very often the cost is negligible compared to the impact of extended lead times and poor on-time delivery, so we’re experiencing a definite trend in which the focus of the major mining houses has shifted to operational efficiencies. Any sort of downtime far outweighs the cost of components or parts, therefore in addition to trying to reduce the overall cost of our products to these customers, we’re committed to ensuring that parts are available when they are needed.

“This commitment has allowed us to improve our overall lead times across Africa to an average of about 90% — which is world class.”

Ongoing efforts to enhance Weir Minerals Africa’s supply chain have also seen initiatives rolling out to its outsourced suppliers. For example, Wadeville based Admo Engineering has become one of the company’s core outsourced suppliers for locally manufactured parts. Today the company primarily operates on behalf of Weir Minerals Africa to make elements such as cyclone clusters, fabrications and machined components. Other third party suppliers include Simmer Engineering and IPT who provide engineering solutions including fabrications, castings and machining.

“Downstream we’re further enabling our branches and aligning them to best practice,” van Vliet adds. “We deploy a ‘hub and spoke’ logistics model which means that the majority of inventory is held centrally before being distributed to our branch network across Africa.

“The central hub model helps us optimise our inventory holding by enabling us to forecast the off-take of parts from customers. Each of our service centres throughout Africa has its own ISO certified warehouse, some of which are actually bigger than our central facility and we’re poised to roll out the best practice developed centrally to optimise these facilities.

“Weir Minerals Africa will continue its journey of on-going improvement. To support the dramatic growth our business is enjoying, we need to get better and better at our internal processes.