Munster Simms Engineering Limited better known under the product brand name Whale, is an independent company engaged in the design, manufacture, marketing and selling of pumps, valves, faucets and plumbing (water systems) used in mobile or low voltage environments.

Based in Bangor, Northern Ireland, the company has a long history of quality product and customer orientation and a track record over recent years for product innovation.

Munster Simms is an exceptional success story and a refreshing break from the normal “doom and gloom” stories in manufacturing. They are going from strength to strength in the leisure vehicle industry. The company has seen market share increase over the last 12 months in the face of generally weakened world-wide markets. In fact the company, who export their range of water and waste pumps for boats and caravans to vehicle manufacturers and parts distributors world-wide, has recently had to open a US office to keep up with demand.

Commitment to drive down production costs
Financial controller, Wesley Hanson, puts the success down to the company’s absolute commitment to drive down production costs without reducing customer service and value. Indeed this has resulted in some interesting business challenges, and INFOR ERP has been successfully used at the Bangor based plant to address them.

Some of Munster Simms components and materials are imported from the Far East with long lead times, and so their use needs to be carefully forecasted to ensure supply. Yet, to reduce waste, Munster Simms chose to implement Kanban. Munster Simms needs tight control over the supply line.

“Kanban makes perfect sense for controlling our shop floor,” said Wesley Hanson. “Our products are made in dedicated or semi-dedicated cells, and our key goal is to keep everyone working to meet fluctuating demand without introducing complexity, and most importantly, without letting customers down.”


Having a mixture of requirements presented an interesting dilemma to Wesley Hanson. “We needed a very lean production control system, yet quite sophisticated procurement planning,” he explained. “However, we were pleased to see that INFOR was flexible enough to cope with those diverse needs.” Munster Simms contracted In2grate to re-model the way that their system was being used.

The solution for Munster Simms was to use demand planning - also called sales and operations planning - and transfer the results of market analysis easily into INFOR. From there, the system was
set-up to manage long-term procurement needs to meet the sales plan, while letting Kanban run the
shopfloor.

We were very pleased with this outcome,” commented Wesley Hanson. “We have 1000’s of parts, and we sell to such a variety of markets that the thought of having to track component demand for our entire range was daunting to say the least.”