AKW is the UK’s leading manufacturer of accessible bathroom, kitchen and mobility support solutions for older people and people with reduced mobility and disabilities. With over a million satisfied customers, AKW is the manufacturing brand of choice for customers across the UK and abroad.
AKW work closely with Occupational Therapists, Housing Associations, Care Homes and leading research institutes to develop and provide the products and services that they and their customers need most, using great manufacturing design and innovation.
“Smartsheet was initially deployed to manage a number of operational projects, as it was cheaper and easier to use than Microsoft Project and enabled real collaboration between project teams. However, the use of Smartsheet has extended way beyond project management.
With a large number of overseas suppliers payable in numerous different currencies, the contractual effects of currency fluctuations were difficult to establish in a timely manner using spreadsheets. PPS developed an App to link a foreign exchange currency website with Smartsheet and a dashboard was developed to instantly show the financial impact of currency movements – both overall and by certain key suppliers. This enabled the information required to make critical contractual decisions to become available in “real-time”.
One limitation of standard Smartsheet functionality is that only 500 rows of data can be copied and pasted into a pre-existing Smartsheet. This was causing an issue when we wanted to start analysing the purchase of 4,500 products using Smartsheet. PPS developed an App to overcome this, enabling up to 5,000 rows to be copied from Excel and pasted into Smartsheet in a single operation.
Smartsheet is now used extensively within the operational departments of AKW, from the Warehouse and Logistics through to Quality and Customer Services. Dashboards are used to display KPIs and automated reports help to eliminate manually written emails. Non-value added activities have been reduced, enabling supervisors and managers to act upon information rather than simply compiling it.
PPS have enabled AKW to achieve these benefits by providing support and technical expertise whenever it has been required.”
Matt Till
Logistics Director
AKW