Launched in 1974 to manufacture tool making, Rod Wah took over the business in 1981 and developed new opportunities in the aerospace industry.
Since then it has invested in technology to expand sectors to pharma, oil and gas and power, and has a 60-strong workforce and turnover of £5.2m.
Beverston began its digitisation journey three years ago after embarking on a knowledge transfer partnership with Liverpool John Moores University to deep dive into how technologies could help it achieve its business goals.
The company then looked for support and advice from Made Smarter to develop a digital strategy to adopt those technologies.
Beverston’s challenge was its lack of connectivity between its ERP system and 18 machines on the factory floor.
“Our current state is that we don’t have real-time visibility for monitoring production,” Rod explained. "We monitor production based on manual inputs of jobs, production and labour in a manufacturing execution system on the factory floor. So manual intervention opens us up to human error.
“Analysing and calculating our performance using the ERP system is also very time-consuming and involves sifting through lots of information to pick out what is important. Our efficiency sits around 76 percent on average across the year.”
“We want a system that automatically captures the data being produced by our machines and processes, and then tells you what you need to know then and there, not weeks after the event.”