with a key production meeting held on a Monday morning, which generates a report to all customers to show delivery against requirement."

Managing director, Stuart Grant, explains: "We have made several appointments recently, including recruiting Peter Jones as our new production controller. This addresses the emphasis from our customer base, which is now biased towards forward schedules with an open flow of information and work requirements via portals. Working this way suits the way we want to progress and we are now doing a lot more work to schedules or to forward order requirements. We run weekly demand signals on the Kanban systems we operate for various customers, with a key production meeting held on a Monday morning, which generates a report to all customers to show delivery against requirement."

A strategic change made by main customers means that Premier now handles the whole procurement trail on their behalf, from sourcing raw material through heat treatment, drilling and machining and even buffer stock holding to smooth the demand peaks and troughs. This change makes the role of production controller vital.

As production controller, Peter Jones is the first point of contact for a number of key customers, handling day-to-day events and working directly for the production manager, Kevin O'Riordan. "This role is very much about customer focus, so the customers know that they will receive a report on Monday afternoon stating exactly what we produced the previous week and what the intension is for the coming week. This flow of information is important because demand can fluctuate from week to week, usually only by around +/- 5 per cent but occasionally it can change by a substantial amount and we need to plan and control these situations. This is when Peter's experience comes to the fore," says Stuart Grant.

Peter has experience in a number of industrial sectors and his strengths include implementing and operating manufacturing systems. Just prior to joining Premier he was responsible for setting up the operating system at a specialist spare parts stocking company, and although his background is orientated towards systems at much higher volume levels than Premier currently operate on there is scope for future development on this front.

He also has specific responsibility for the recently restructured shopfloor training programme operated by the company. Peter facilitates this and drives the training matrices to keep the rolling six and 12 month plans on target for all production staff. Finally, he is also responsible for the preventative maintenance programme developed by Premier to ensure all plant and equipment is available for production.