Success Story: Splosh Cleans Up Its Processes with MRPeasy

UK sustainable cleaning products manufacturer Splosh uses MRPeasy to get a grip on their production planning and inventory management.

Producing cleaning agents with a clean conscience

Splosh is a Welsh cleaning products manufacturer that is disrupting the home chemical industry by offering sustainable refill solutions directly to consumers. Their product catalog includes shower gels, shampoos, hand soaps, laundry, and dishwashing products as well as surface cleaners, plus a range of refillable bottles. Since its inception in 2012, the company has aimed to provide customers in the UK with eco-friendly yet affordable cleaning products by cutting out intermediaries and unnecessary packaging. Today, Splosh has 9 people on payroll and brings in £1.5 million annually.

Spreadsheets failed to support the company’s growth

When Splosh started properly marketing its products in 2018, its order volumes began to grow accordingly. Managing the business with the help of Google Sheets, director Angus Grahame had set up a practical little system that would allow workers to create records of production processes, raw materials, and other items. With the growing production, however, they soon reached a point where it became unfeasible to manage the business with spreadsheets.

“I started to realize that I could not control or manage stock at all,” Angus says. “So, I started to look for a more functional solution.”

One solution that ticked all the boxes

Googling around, he found a number of options that promised to fulfill Splosh’s needs. One of these was MRPeasy, which swiftly proved to be the right choice for Splosh.

“I quickly realized that MRPeasy had considerable depth, particularly for the type of manufacturing we do,” Angus states. “It seemed to offer a lot more than the other options.”

Apart from tools for inventory management, Splosh also found in MRPeasy a solution that would help them with production planning and packing of the finished goods.

“It ticked all the boxes,” Angus affirms. “One major one was stock control, but we also needed something that would support the management of multiple locations and allow us to understand our cost of goods sold. The more we dive into MRPeasy, the more we get out of it.”

Implementation was a one-man job

As a business owner wearing many hats, Angus took on implementing the new system all by himself. “Back then, there just wasn’t anyone else,” he explains. “It took me a very long weekend to get all the data in.”

Production manager Suzanne Boak joined the company later and having used a much larger ERP system in her previous job, she felt MRPeasy was exceedingly easy to use.

“I worked previously with Netsuite, which was a behemoth and a quite difficult system to work with,” she states. “MRPeasy feels like a breeze, to be honest. I find it intuitive and simple. You can look at it and feel that you know what’s going to come out of it. There’s no fear that you’re going to press something and the whole thing’s going to explode.”

New system makes a big difference

The new system has made a big difference to the workload of the production manager as well as to the overall efficiency of the company. When previously all of the planning was done manually, offline in spreadsheets, with no meaningful way of tracking efficiencies, now there was an all-in-one solution to manage inventory, plan and schedule production, and tackle wastes in the production process.

“I can easily see what I have planned, I can quickly check if that is still appropriate according to my stock levels, and I can simply drag something to a different date or time,” Suzanne says. “So, it’s helping me with my organization but it’s also helping me identify where we’ve got wastes and inefficiencies that I can work on with the team.”

Software that grows with the company

Splosh has not yet implemented every functionality MRPeasy has to offer, but the company is looking to dive deeper in the future.

“What we haven’t yet addressed but are planning to implement soon is batch numbers,” Angus says.

Suzanne adds: “We’ve started seeing improvement in productivity, but we can also see how we can utilize MRPeasy further to increase accuracy and help to drive down wastes and improve processes. This, in turn, will support our customer satisfaction levels.”

When asked about whether they would recommend MRPeasy to other manufacturers, Suzanne says: “I’ve already recommended MRPeasy to a friend of mine who is a supply chain manager. I would recommend it to others. Having previously experienced different ERP systems, we were unable to use the manufacturing side and had to do it separately, finding lots of workarounds which was really difficult and time-consuming. Coming in and just being able to understand a system that feels quite simple but does the job is fantastic.”

“I would also definitely recommend it. Definitely,” Angus confirms.