iVendScale and iBinScale deliver inventory management vending and mobile automated replenishment for factories, helping to boost productivity. Having come up with the concept for the two new products, Inventor-e tapped into the Manufacturing Assembly Network, partnering with MAN member PP Control & Automation (PPC&A) to manage the design for manufacture and build of the solutions.
“We recognised early on that our core strength lay in the design and constant evolution of products and solutions and that the manufacture and assembly of our systems should be outsourced to a partner that could grow with us as we expand,” said Dean Henry, Inventor-e’s founder.
“This journey led to us appointing PPC&A to support the build of our first products in SmartStores Secure and iVendcab, which proved to us that this was the right approach and paved the way for our latest launches. We’ve just placed iVendScale into its first industrial location with Mitsubishi and the pipeline of orders suggest we’ll be hitting £5m next year, impossible without the right outsourcing solution in place.”
PPC&A was invited to take on full supply chain management for the iVendScale and iBinScale and, following a review of performance and capabilities, introduced fellow MAN members C-MAC SMT – for printed circuit board assembly – and engineering consultancy Grove Design.
“Our role is to create the supply chain and the production line to ensure we can scale-up rapidly for Inventor-e’s existing solutions and its increasing range of new products,” said Tony Hague, CEO of PPC&A.
“Our mechanical and assembly experience helped us shave days off the lead time on all of the products and, by working together, we have been able to optimise costs through design for manufacture to help the client achieve the elusive ‘price points’ it requires.”
