Continuous improvement for Black & Decker with the help of PDMS

Black & Decker are currently implementing major changes to several of their core business systems, developed by PDMS, to help improve their business processes. PDMS have been working with Black & Decker, the world's largest producer of electric power tools for domestic DIY and commercial use, for several years.

In 2000 the Bill of Materials System and the Service Information System, published on Black & Decker's intranet, CD-ROM and the website, all went live. The service information system supports the company's thousands of service engineers around the world, providing product data, documents, parts lists and ‘exploded' service illustrations for over 3,000 products with a total of 210,000 parts. Black & Decker pride themselves on excellent customer support and the same information is also available to customers on the website, www.2helpu.com, providing immediate access to up to date product information. The Service Information System uses the latest version of PDMS' foundations for catalogues platform which provides Black & Decker with the flexibility to publish their own CD-ROM catalogues. The Bill of Materials system, one of Black & Decker's key systems, manages data on product components and creates processes, records and distributes Service Change Notes, making the turnaround time for new versions and upgrades significantly shorter.

Although PDMS have worked with Black & Decker to support these systems over the last three years, the recent work marked the first major changes to these systems since their initial launch. A desire to further streamline and improve business practices was the major motivation behind the changes, which have been made both to the underlying central database and the individual business systems. Developments included enhancements to the report generation facilities for both service and management information, to help improve business decision making and the further automation of some of the change note procedures to increase efficiency.

PDMS have a dedicated project team who have been working closely with their counterparts at Black & Decker to ensure that the changes to the systems were rolled out with minimum disruption to the business.