1. Define the Organisation Ø Nature ofthe business Establishedin 1832 Fernite have built up a world-class notoriety as a maker of machineblades. Fernite of Sheffield Limited is machineknife manufacturers and steel stockholdersselling Spring steel strip and specialising in supplying small quantities ofsteel to small and medium-sized businesses. Fernite is involved in the food, printing, packaging, plastics andrecycling industries, supplying world leading brands with high-quality products. There are four divisions of the company, Print Blade, Fernite machineknives, BSS Spring Steel Strip and AF Whiteley Granulatorblades. Machineknives are used in production processes which involve any form of cuttingoperation.
Granulatorblades are used in the recycling and plastics industries for size reduction, doctorblades are used in industrial printing machinery. Springsteel strip is used in a variety of applications including tool making, springforming, cutlery making and medical tools. Ø Vision/Mission/Objectives Ferniteof Sheffield Limited believes in building a great UK manufacturing business.They aim to be the favourite supplier of their customers but also they believein manufacturing great products with friendly and reliable service. To do so, they put a lot of effort into customer support so that the customers get the bestservice when it comes to reliability and also problem-solving, responding tothe issues the customers experience.
Another thing that the company aims for isbuilding a great place to work for its employeesso that they can enjoy working in the environment that surrounds them. Also, the company invest in new technology andit aims to continue doing that and even investing in upgrading the existingtechnology. Fernite is proud of what they do because they manufacture only quality products that makethem reflect the other companies in the industry. Fernie’s vision statement is: “Webelieve in building a great UK manufacturing business, recognised as ourcustomers’ favourite supplier, manufacturing great quality products with afriendly, reliable service. Fernite will be a great place to work for greatemployees, generating a sustainable profit” Ø Culture andManagement style Ferniteof Sheffield Limited is an exporting company that serves markets all over theworld including, Europe, United States of America, Asia, Australia and manymore. They have a problem-solving culture which means that if a customer has aproblem with a blade, they will do their best to solve it – whether that is aproblem with cutting performance, lead time or durability. Ferniteis a passionate company that has belief, energy and enthusiasm to be the bestin everything the company does.
The company invests not only in technology butalso in its team. Recently Fernite expanded its team with four new roles whichare ‘Group Operations Manager’, ‘Group Technical Manager’, ‘ProductionEngineer’ and ‘Marketing Executive’. Whenit comes to technology Fernite has recently invested in two new machines. Oneof them is a packing machine for the warehouse which has made dispatchingproducts quicker and cheaper. The other newmachine is XYZ 1020 VMC which is CNC Vertical Machining Center.
The verticallyoriented spindles of that machine approach mounted on their table pieces.Because the machine was solid build it can cut heavy and faster with higherprecision. It is similar to some of the older machines in the factory but it isa newer upgraded version of them, also ithas a user-friendly interface which makesthe machine easy to use for the operators. Ferniteinvests in its employees and engages them with the values and objectives of thecompany. Team leaders are trained in team management and are given responsibilityand freedom to run their own departments.
Ø RelevantBackground/History TheCity of Sheffield’s proud relationship with cutlery making started in thefifteenth century and this is the time when Sheffield first received itscharter. In the centuries that followed, the impressive reputation of the citycontinued to flourish. By the middle 1600s, the city’s notoriety for producingthe finest cutlery in England was great to the point that Chaucer even alludesto it in ‘The Canterbury Tales’.
Whatenabled Sheffield to become plainly a world pioneer in the steel industry wasits capacity to exploit progressive advances in metallurgy. From themid-eighteenth century onwards, these prompted incredible advances in thecutlery creation forms utilized as a part of the city. Theinvention of the Bessemer converter andthe Huntsman’s technique were two of the main reasons that caused Sheffield toturn from a small town into one of the leading industrial cities in Europe.
Beforethe creation of the open hearth furnace,the Bessemer converter was known to be the first cheap industrial wayfor the massive production of steel from pig iron. Being blown through themolten iron by oxidation with air, the impurities were removed from the ironwhich is the most important principle. Furnacefired from coke capable of reaching 1,600 degrees Celsius was used by theHuntsmen’s technique. This furnace had room for twelve pots or so-called clay crucibles and each of that pots were able to hold fifteen kilograms of iron.Before cooling a crystal structure was produced from the completed melting ofthe steel, which after cooling gave increased strength and hardness of thesteel compared to the other steel that has been made at that time.
Cauldron steel and silver plating made immensemeasures of riches here – at any rate for the prosperous steel producers. Thenagain, conditions for most working individuals were poor, with congestion,uncontrolled contamination from processing plants and foundries, and illness. Ferniteof Sheffield Limited is one of the oldest producers of machine knives in theworld. It was founded in 1832 under the name Fearnehough and Sons Limited byJoseph Fearnehough.
Underthe heading of Joseph and his family, thecompany advanced through a variety ofchanges such as changing its name to ‘Fernite’ which was actually derived fromthe surname of its founder. Fernite is a trademark which speaks for the genuineSheffield quality in the making of machine knives. The organization moved toDarnall in 1969 which is its present site and in 1996 the Fearnehough and SonsLtd. organization changed its name to the brand Fernite. The ‘Made inSheffield’ marque is respected throughout the UK and across the world forexcellence in manufacturing, and Fernite of Sheffield Limited carries thatmarque because each Fernite item is made in Sheffield. Fernite has a finelegacy, impeccable notoriety and developing relationships with clients aroundthe world, which gladly keeps on being thrived and maintained by theorganization. Ø Structure Ferniteis a private limited company, owned by the Managing Director. Thecompany has 37 employees.
Thestructure of the company Fernite of Sheffield Limited is based on teams. Theteams are as follow: – Team Dispatch- Team Production- Team Sales- Technical Team- Operations Team- Management Team Each team is headed up by a teamleader, who is responsible for running their section of the business. Teamleaders have been trained in people managementand organising their departments to run efficiently. Overall my opinion is that thecompany has clear vision and objectives about that what they want to achieve.This combined with their history and the way they value and appreciate theircustomers will help them grow in future. 2. Define you Position in theOrganisation. Ø AnOrganisation chart/ The Structure of your Department/ The Reporting Structure Organisationchart:Themembers of the shop floor teams ‘Dispatch’ and the two ‘Production’ teamsreport to their team leaders.
Then the team leaders give reports to the’Operations manager’ who later on reports to the ‘Managing Director’. Thepeople under the job titles ‘Accounts’ and ‘Steel Sales’ together with the’Marketing Executive’, ‘Senior Customer Service Executive’ and the ‘CustomerService Executive’ report to the ‘Sales Manager’. Then the ‘Sales Managerreports to the ‘Managing Director’. Thepeople under the job titles ‘Technical Sales Engineer’, ‘Production Engineer’together with the people under the job title ‘Maintenance Technician’ report tothe ‘Technical Manager’ who reports to the ‘Managing Director’. Ø The titleof those with whom you work Myrole in the business is Software Developer. My job involves working closelywith the Managing Director of Fernite of Sheffield Limited and the managementteam. The members of the management team have the following titles: – Managing Director, who has overall responsibility forthe running of the business and its strategy. – Group Sales Manager who is responsible for the salesteam, developing relationships with customers and exploring new markets in theUK and overseas in order to expand the company’s reach.
– Group Operations Manager responsible for the runningof the factory and managing Fernite’soperations.- Group Technical Manager responsible for optimisingFernite’s processes, cutting production lead timesand taking care for the best use of the technology on the shop floor. Myjob often involves working with the Senior Customer Service Executive, SteelSales Engineer, Warehouse Team Leader and Production Team Leader.
Ø The tasksyou have to carry out/ How they relate to the overall objectives of theorganisation. Aspart of the Fernite team, my job involvesdesigning and developing software helping Fernite to automate some of itsprocesses. So far I have created two software applications. Oneof those two applications is involved in Fernite’ssales department, and it is used by the sales team. Itspurpose is to increase the sales of Laser Cut parts by speeding up the salesprocess of those type of jobs.
Enabling the sales executives to come up with aprice for the customer regarding his query a lot faster than before. By fillingjust a small amount of detail using the software, the sales executive will havethe chance to form an enquiry just with a couple of buttons because thesoftware itself has the logic needed for the creation of such enquiry build init. This means that once the required information is provided with the software will generate the enquiryautomatically instead of the sales executive doing it manually. Thesoftware is created with VisualBasic.NET programming language and is a WindowsForm application with a user-friendlydesign and easy to navigate between the different windows or so-called forms. Thewindows application provides you with two options either to use a specific typeof text file sent by the customer or manually fill couple boxes withinformation provided by the customer over the phone in case he does not havethe needed file. In order to achieve that the software does a lot ofinteracting with the databases of the company.
That means that there is a lotof queries such as ‘Insert’, ‘Update’ and ‘Select’ queries. Such queries are used to either store, update or exportdata. Theother piece of software is related to the managing the priority jobs on theshop floor. Iwas set the task of developing a piece of software that would display a list ofurgent tasks for each operation in the factory, to improve the flow of work through the factory and ensureorders are completed on time. It is a table containing information about theopen and active jobs on the shop floor. The application is exporting accuratedata from the live database using SQL queries and it is displaying the jobs foreach work centre location on the shopfloor sorted by the date they are due to be out. Not only this but also it is prioritizing the jobs sothat the team at each location knows which operation to start first.
This meansthat if a job has a higher priority set to it, the row of the table containinginformation about that job will change its colour. This will point that it isurgent for this job to be finished and Ishould be started as soon as possible. Since the application is WindowsFormbased application created with VisualBasic.
Net. The extracted data is displayedin customized DataGridView available from the Toolbox located in the designertab. Thisis going to help Fernite manage its orders better without any delays, whichmeans that number of late jobs is going to decrease drastically leading to thecompany keeping to its deadlines and reducing lead times for customers.
Ø Yourresponsibilities Myresponsibilities involve updating and providing support for the existingsoftware of the company which means that every time a software fails eitherwith the exporting data from the database or something else it is myresponsibilities to clear the error and make sure it does not appear again. Anotherresponsibility I have to carry out is taking care of the databases so that they are not interrupted by fault data andalso designing new databases. Also,another responsibility of mine on a daily basis is providing IT support for thecomputer technology around the factory.
This means that if there is a problem with one of the printers in the officeor with the computers it is my responsibility to take care of the issue. I haveassisted with the installation of new PCsand configuring them when new members of staff have joined the company. Commonenquiries I deal with include network connection problems, hardwaretroubleshooting and maintenance, assisting colleagues with software enquiries,cable management and assistance with the accessing information from the companydatabases. 3. Describe the Environment ofthe Organisation Ø Anyrelationships with government/ political aspects Fernitein an exporting business that is reporting sales and exporting to thegovernment.
Politicalaspects include payment of necessary tariffs and duties on imports and exportsset by Governments. The country’s customsauthorities collect those type of payments called import duties on the importsand on some exports, usually based on the value of the imported goods. Ferniteis a member of the local chamber of commerce, a network of businesses whichprovides support, advice and a voice for business in the region. The Chamber ofCommerce interacts with local, regional and national Governments on behalf ofits members. Themanaging director must also report statistics to the UK Government.
This allowsGovernment statisticians to calculate the growth in the economy and individualsectors. Withthe use of commodity codes which are codes that refer to the Harmonized Systemwhich is the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding system, theGovernments and organisations that are not governmental monitor controlledproducts. Also for tax purposes thanks to the commodity codes they are able toidentify goods. Another thing that the commodity codes are used for is the implementation of the price and quotaregulations on exports and imports. Thecompany is an ISO 9001 accredited company, which means they comply withinternationally recognised standards. The main purpose of using this standardis to increase the satisfaction of the customers when quality products aredelivered. Ø Themarketplace / Market share / Competitors Machineknives are used in production lines and industrial machinery to perform cuttingoperations. Ferniteserves markets all over the world including Europe, United States of America,Asia, Australia and many more.
There are four divisions of the company and theyare: – Print Blade takes care of the production of doctorblades.- Fernite is a machine knives manufacturer.- BSS is a steel stockholder of Spring Steel Strip.- AF Whiteley takes careof the granulator blades. Withthe four divisions of the company covering different aspects of the steelindustry. Fernite is able to specialise and compete in different markets. Mostof the Print Blade’s customers are foreign companies mainly located in Europeand Asia.
While most of the AF Whiteley’s customers are United Kingdomcompanies. When it comes to Fernite and BSS they are very well known to customers all over the world. Ferniteas a manufacturer of quality products is more concerned tostrengthen its position on the quality markets rather than the quantity ones.
AsChina and other Asian countries have captured the cheaper end of the globalsteel market, Sheffield and UK companies have focused on producing higher valueproducts which require precision or advanced engineering. Fernitemanufacture in the UK using high-qualityEuropean steel. This means their products are marketed on quality rather thancompeting on price, and many of Fernite’scompetitors are UK or European based companies as well. Ø The legalposition Ferniteof Sheffield Ltd is a private limited company. This means the company is alegal entity in itself and the owners have limited liability – – meaning they arenot personally liable for its debts. LimitedCompanies have certain restrictions on its ownership while its shareholdershave legal protection.
The restrictions are preventing any hostile takeoverattempts and usually, they are defined inthe bylaws or regulations of the company. The following are some of the majorownership restrictions: – Without offering their shares to the othershareholders, a shareholder cannot sell his shares.- Shares cannot be offered over stock exchange to thepublic by its shareholder- There is a fixed figure for shareholders which cannotbe exceeded. Ø Collaborations/ Joint ventures global company? , local versus international Fernitehad worked with market researchers and export specialists at the UKGovernment’s Department of International Trade. This department helpsbusinesses grow and export into global markets by giving support and advice onthat how the number of services soldoverseas could be increased or to start exporting. Fernite operates through distribution networks acrossthe world, with distributors identifying new customers and supplying them withFernite products.
