Element Six is a leading global supplier of synthetic and natural industrial-grade diamonds and other industrial abrasives. Its abrasives are used for cutting, grinding, drilling, and polishing metal, concrete, glass, plastics, and other materials.

The company is headquartered in London and has sales and manufacturing facilities in 17 countries, including the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, Ireland, and the UK. The company, formerly De Beers Industrial Diamonds (Debid), is an independently managed part of the De Beers group of companies.

The Challenge

As with many large companies that have a geographically distributed business model and that have experienced rapid growth, Element Six found itself to be in possession of a vast array of operational processes across the globe. This situation translated into a lack of visibility and process control across the organisation, and was impeding the company’s goal of being a demand driven manufacturer.

The key issue was inventory: in a business such as Element Six’s, where there is a long lead time on raw materials, global visibility over the islands of information in warehouses in each market is key. The company recognised that by centralising information about inventory, it could create an environment where raw materials could be shipped on demand and consequently, budgets could be more tightly controlled.

The Approach

In 2004 Element Six decided to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, enabling them to transform the way they managed their supply chain and consequently, their business. 

It was critical that the chosen ERP solution should be flexible enough to be deployed across multiple countries, easy to administer and scalable enough to cope with the companies continued growth. Element Six also felt it was important to identify a solution that had a particular strength in manufacturing. Taking into account the competitive pressures of a fully globalised trading economy, Element Six wanted to ensure that any new system would enable it to adapt to changing market conditions by fully supporting the business through periods of change. 

After an extensive selection process, Element Six selected JDE Enterprise One, and System Dynamics as their chosen implementation partner.

The Solution

Today, Element Six is using EnterpriseOne to manage its entire supply chain across six manufacturing's sites and its distribution network in Europe, Japan, the Far East and South America. Element Six’s comprehensive ERP implementation includes nearly every EnterpriseOne module available.

Element Six and System Dynamics have completed roll out of EnterpriseOne to 13 companies in 11 different countries, and 2,000 employees. All of its manufacturing facilities and distribution offices in Japan are now live.  Element Six experiences consistent growth through acquisition, but at its present size, it has four small distribution offices to go in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Brazil, before the whole company roll out is complete.

“Element Six is constantly growing and evolving and, to a certain degree, completing whole company roll out is like trying to hit a moving target”, says Patrick Seeber, Group Head of IT. “With EnterpriseOne this isn’t an issue because of its flexibility and scalability.”

The Benefits

The modular architecture and documented, open design of the JDE EnterpriseOne ERP system has streamlined back-office information management, integrating functional modules into a single transactional system. The result is greater data integrity, a coherent and holistic view of the enterprise, and the ability for Element Six to respond to changes in demand and manage its effects downstream with suppliers and customers.

Element Six now enjoys full control and visibility over its manufacturing operations, and has a fully integrated pipeline.  When orders for raw materials are placed, Element Six has a holistic view: they know exactly how much stock is being held at every global location, and due to the granularity of the system, they can act on up to the minute information; they can know where extra stock is being held due to cancelled orders, for example. This enables the company to choose where to resource raw materials from, how, when and how much.

“Rather than islands of information, Element Six now has a transparent, end-to-end supply chain process,” says Patrick Seeber. “EnterpriseOne has replaced over 20 legacy systems, and has enabled us to enjoy an ERP system in its truest sense. “