With eye-watering energy bills already threatening the viability of some Irish firms, manufacturers may want to plan strategic shutdowns this winter to save resources, Irish entrepreneur Richie Barter, chief executive of supply-chain software firm Replan, has said.
If you have, let’s say, periods where you need less capacity utilisation of your lines, you could actually say, ‘OK, well, there is going to be less power available during this period, let’s shut down manufacturing for this week.’”
“Save that effort in energy and costs and labour and actually run the factories more intensively in other periods. And those kinds of strategic decisions are things that we enable manufacturers to do quite quickly.”
Incorporated in the UK as AltViz in 2014, Mr Barter rebranded the company to Replan in April this year to take advantage of a growing opportunity for supply-chain tech.
Smart supply-chain management was catapulted into the limelight at the end of Covid, and the energy squeeze is reinforcing the benefits, he said.
“We rebranded the company, sort of as a statement to say we are going all in on this supply-chain area of planning. We think there is huge opportunity here,” he added.
AltViz had provided a broader data analysis for retail and financial services firms. Replan is focused entirely on supply-chain planning, largely for Irish-based agri-food, chemicals and pharmaceuticals manufacturers.
The software works by analysing manufacturing lines and products to determine a production sequence – or, as Barter calls it, “an order in which they should make stuff”.
“A finance director says, ‘OK, here is your budget for gas, you can spend this much on gas next quarter.’ And the planning team then have to say, ‘OK, what products are we going to make and in what order?’ to maximise the use of that gas. And then our software supports those kind of ‘what if’ scenarios.”
Barter is a former ratings analyst and banker, with a master’s in software engineering from Oxford University.
He runs Replan from Lisbon, Portugal, where he moved recently with his wife and young child after 19 years in London.
Most of Replan’s staff are based in Ireland.
“We had a two-year-old and we were living in a basement in Hackney, and we said, “Well, what are we going to do now? Do we want to stay in London or live in the suburbs of the UK, or try something else?’. Luckily we are both able to do our jobs remotely.”
Earlier this year, Replan announced a £2m (€2.3m) investment led by UK venture capital fund Hoxton Ventures, bringing total investment in the firm to just over £5m in the last decade.
Mr Barter is fresh from setting up a US office and snaring some “massive US organisations” as customers.
Replan currently has around 20 staff, with an office for the sales team in Dublin and most of the software developers operating from a base in Patrick Street in Cork. Barter himself has embraced remote working but says there will always be a need for physical office space for the teams.
“You need to get the developers around in a room and have deep conversations,” he said. “I’m very much a product-focused CEO. I’m in the weeds on the product. I understand what’s happening and what decisions we’re making there.
“I think that’s sort of settling down now into the routine for a lot of smaller companies in terms of flexibility to work remotely, but with a hub that you’re tied to.”
