Case Study: Rapanui

Rapanui is an Award-Winning eco-fashion brand from the UK When bringing key business functions in-house, and investing heavily in the latest digital fabric printing technology, it was soon identified a new facility was required, and it was vital that it ran smoothly and efficiently as soon as the process moved across.

Seirtsudni offered assistance with the layout of the new factory to maximise use of space; effective product flow and get the right balance of flexibility to allow for the peaks in demand Rapanui see. Work was done up-front to determine load & capacity the different equipment within the business, understand physical requirements and constraints associated with them. Working with the data already captured by Rapanui, key measures were identified and used to prioritise use of space and identify risks. New KPI's were also highlighted to provide future opportunities for improvement - Rapanui's responsive internal IT resource mean that these are now available anywhere in the world.

When the right home for the factory was found (a repurposed hangar inside one of the Isle of Wight’s once famous, now derelict, shipbuilding houses), the theories were applied to the layout of the building to produce a map of the layout, then modelled and refined further.

"Because we are now crafting our products in our own factory, we've managed to reduce our costs substantially. By Winter we’d realised one of our biggest dreams – to build a cutting edge, low-waste facility to take manufacturing of Rapanui products to the next level. And like all years, lives, seasons – there’s a springtime to follow on. The start of a new era at Rapanui. We have the space, technology and ability to make our most crazy product dreams become reality. We've been building a factory. And yes, of course it has a zipline" Rapanui

Whilst there were a few teething troubles (including a pillar holding up the roof that wasn’t on the plan) and not everything could be planned for, the layout got it pretty much right from the start. The factory has been a success since being set up, and Rapanui continue going from strength to strength