Over the past 40 years, Playdale has grown to achieve a £12M turnover with 100 staff working across two factories and a distribution warehouse.
The forward-thinking SME has spent the last two years developing a digital roadmap, adopting lean manufacturing principles and investing in IT infrastructure.
It is now ready to apply advanced technologies to key processes such as the design and manufacture of wooden components.
Paul explained: “As it stands the components are created using 3D design software and arranged in optimum position using nesting software. However, it takes around two days to programme our current CNC machine to schedule and cut around 500 panels. The current process is very disjointed, and there is too much manual intervention. We need to do much more - and quicker.”
Playdale also intends to find improvements by extracting and analysing production data from legacy equipment such as saws, drills and presses.