Raymarine: Making the low cost leap

Source: Manufacturing Digital

Date :30/11/2007 10:08:43

Raymarine’s Operations Director John Spottiswood tells Exec UK how he managed the challenging movement of the company’s manufacturing and supplier base from the UK to Hungary.

Written by James Hurley and produced by Ben Weaver

Moving a manufacturing base to a low-cost region is an extremely challenging transition for any company, but it’s now such a common occurrence that it hardly warrants widespread attention.

However, the vast majority of outsourced activity involves low-mix, high-volume manufacturing of products such as consumer electronics. High-mix, low-volume is another matter entirely, and many have suggested that the low-cost option is simply not viable here. Raymarine has emphatically shown that this simply isn’t the case.

A quantum leap

Raymarine is the world leader in marine electronics. It develops and manufactures a comprehensive range of electronic equipment for the recreational boating and light commercial marine markets.

The Raymarine product lines include radar, autopilots, GPS, chartplotters, instruments, fishfinders, communications and software and systems.

In 2005, the company entered into a five-year outsourcing relationship with leading EMS provider Flextronics to outsource both Raymarine’s supplier base and its manufacturing activity from Portsmouth to Zala in Hungary.

Operations Director John Spottiswood was brought on board by CEO Malcolm Miller to manage this remarkable transition. “My relationship with manufacturing basically involves outsourcing the supply base i.e. removing a local and expensive supply base and moving to low cost which normally means Asia, the Far East, or Eastern Europe.”

Spottiswood had previously worked with Miller at Pace Micro Technology, a manufacturer of cable boxes, where he was also Operations Director. While he oversaw the closure of Pace’s factory in Bradford and outsourcing to Romania, he says the challenge at Raymarine was a different one.

“This is low volume, high mix – this is not fast-moving consumer goods. So the outsourcing of this is a quantum leap in difficulty for us and our EMS partner…

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