Cox And Plant conveyor equipment

Based in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, Cox & Plant Products Ltd manufactures and sells conveyors to the food industry throughout Europe. For over 25 years, the company has been a leading supplier of material handling solutions to the dry, snack food and frozen food industries. The range of conveyor equipment Cox & Plant designs and builds includes vibratory applications to process food effectively, improve the appearance of deep frozen products, make handling of the product easier and ensure minimum downtime.

From grading potatoes and similar root crops of all shapes and sizes, to handling frozen chickens and snack foods, the Cox & Plant engineering team has worked with the world's leading food processing brands. The target market is all food and related product processors, based in the UK, France, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland. That incidentally covers fresh fruit and vegetable, confectionery, poultry, pet food, tea and coffee, chilled vegetable salad, frozen fish, cereal, ready meal and rice and oriental food producers.

Cox & Plant Products Ltd is a true SME (small to medium sized enterprise). It's a private and profitable second generation family business employing 20 people. Marketing manager Annmarie Hanlon paints a picture of the company's background and the issues leading up to its move into e-business.

"There are various issues. Less food is processed in the UK today, more is done overseas. This ranges from lower value wet vegetables like potatoes through to sophisticated vegetables like designer lettuce, such as lollo rosso. Tastes in food have changed. People are travelling more and seek more sophisticated foods in their diets. Added to this is the dry products sector such as cereals. There's a lot of demand in Scandinavia for cereals - in breakfast products, cereal bars and biscuits for example."

A key food group in the Nordic countries is a Cox & Plant customer with manufacturing plants in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Latvia and the Ukraine. It needed the company to design and manufacture mixing lines for varied cereal including muesli. The range of food products to be conveyed included ranges of nuts; granulated chocolate; barley, rye and wheat flakes; fruits, etc. There were over 30 separate recipes to be followed with a throughput of 2,000 kilos per hour generating over 4.5 million tonnes of muesli per year.

Meeting the International Communications Challenge

"The company started to have more overseas clients, which posed a communications challenge," said Hanlon. "Our e-focus started in a small way, through how we contacted our customers. We used to rely on fax to contact everyone and moved to e-mail as the first step. Poland for example is a large producer of vegetables for use in prepared foods, due to the vast land mass available for growing produce. There's been quite a swing for vegetable production from continental Europe to Eastern Europe. That brings with it different groups of people and different forms of communication."

Some might say the cost of sending faxes isn't that high. But when you're sending 20 pages of drawings to five different sites in different countries, the costs ramp up. Plus there's no way of being sure the pages have got through.

"With e-mail, you can ensure the information gets through faster, right to the recipient's desk," said Hanlon. "Then we started to get requests for brochures. With an e-system you can do this immediately. We had developed our web site - www.cox-plant.com - in the summer of 2000, and mounted all our brochure information on the site."

Online Spares Ordering a Major Breakthrough

The company next moved on to customer spares. Requests were often received from customers to hold spares in stock. The problem for Cox & Plant was that to maintain lists of spares and processing spares details was time consuming. Enter then the online spares ordering system.

"With web site spares, the engineers who invariably do the ordering are techies who not only know exactly what they want and what to look for, they remember everything down to the product numbers," said Hanlon. "With the online spares system, engineers coming to the site look what spares are available and place orders online."

Getting Customer Feedback is Critical

Next Cox & Plant did a customer survey and asked its customers what they wanted. This is a key point in Cox & Plant's make-up - it talks to its customers constantly. How did they want to pay for spares? Few if any had company credit cards. What was wanted was the traditional purchase order number and invoice system. So once ordered, spares are dispatched with an invoice. The company also produces a new products newsletter regularly.

Innovation enables new product concepts to be created. Hanlon quoted the example of a fish finger laning machine. In fish finger production, the fingers tend to bunch up on the production line right at the boxing point. Cox & Plant produced a conveyor which vibrates and ensures the fingers are in straight lines to be placed in their boxes. That sort of information can be conveyed immediately to customers through the newsletter.

"Five years ago we were in the vegetable sector only," said Hanlon. "Being e-enabled meant we succeeded in entering the dried cereal market. Now a major washing powder manufacturer has found us through our web site. Registering the web site with web search engines has really paid off."

Keep the Web Site Looking Fresh

But it is the way that this has been done that strikes Cox & Plant out from the crowd. The technology champion is Andrew Cox, second generation king pin in the company who is a very keen techno-advocate who ensured computers were on everyone's desks early on. Cox had to impress his father that the e-route was the right path to tread, promising it would bring efficiencies and new business. He was right.

Cox & Plant's web site is constructed in tables rather than the more often seen frames. "What this means is the whole page is printed off," said Hanlon. "There's a different title to each page. Sitting at the computer's web screen, and looking at the Microsoft or Netscape title bar across the top, we used words blue chip companies would be able to recognise, relating to Cox & Plant conveyor equipment. Using this approach meant we are listed high up in the search engines' priority tables."

"We re-register the site every six weeks, going through the required process so all information is correct and up-to-date," said Hanlon. "We also have a monthly maintenance programme where the information is updated, and we apply a system - called a rolling gif - of having moving photo images on the site. This way everything looks new and fresh."

There are also links to satellite web sites, such as www.multiheadweighers.com, which carries details of products that can be processed using Cox & Plant conveyor systems.

So, What Return on Investment Can Be Expected?

The return on investment is already starting to be seen. The company received an enquiry through its web site shortly after launching it - and the business accruing as a direct result of that enquiry covered the cost of setting up the site, and more.

"Note that we handle some £250,000 worth of spares in a year, and of that £70,000 has been generated via the web site," said Hanlon.

As with many of the SMEs leading the way into e-business, Andrew Cox's entrepreneurial and proactive approach leads him to vigorous networking with colleagues, and talking to many local groups.

Hanlon summed up the progress so far as "e-excellent - it has worked" and then adds: "The difference is, we're not just running a web site. The site is part of an overall co-ordinated marketing strategy. It is part of a total package."

Success with e-business? The most tangible factor is the number of spares orders which have increased. This means increased business but in a more effective way. Hitherto Cox & Plant tended to focus on selling new machines. Although there was the opportunity to sell spares, the company never did this in a focused way. Now, the e-approach has made this accessible to all customers, regardless of location.

The future? Educating the company's own suppliers up the supply chain. This is a sector that is notoriously slow to move, yet appreciating the tangible results produced down the supply chain should be the necessary spur to action. The key point to impress is that e-business is not the business, it is a tool to help a business become more efficient. Take that on board and you're on the way to success. Like Cox & Plant.