How do you build the most beautiful interiors for luxury superyachts as efficiently as possible? That is the challenge the employees of Van Der Loo Yacht Interiors are working on every day. Preventing rework due to errors in the production process is also a top priority. With help from Ciphix, Van Der Loo built the low-code app “Furniture control. Van Der Loo now has much more insight into what goes wrong. As a result, this process can be optimized and, in case of errors, can be switched faster. In addition, the app provides insight into the biggest pain points. The resulting management information is used to improve efficiency even further.

Luxury yachts made of high-quality materials
Van Der Loo Yacht Interiors combines traditional skills with modern technologies to build luxury high-end interiors for superyachts sold under the name Feadship. The company has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Van Lent Shipyard since 1985 and operates out of Waddinxveen with about 100 employees. Royal Van Lent is their main client, but the interior builder also works for other shipyards. They use high-quality materials and the very best woods for the design of fully customized yacht interiors. Because of the use of the finest and best materials, Van Der Loo wants to avoid waste as much as possible. This so-called ‘rework’ – in which errors on a piece of furniture have to be repaired – costs a lot of material and time. To further optimize its production processes, Van Der Loo decided to launch a company-wide improvement project ‘Van Der Loo in flow’. The project to reduce rework is one of the spearheads of this.

With digitization more insight
Sander Krak, Technical Lead and responsible for the quality and manufacturability of the production process at Van Der Loo: “If you aim for less material loss in production, you first have to get a clear picture of what actually goes wrong. Until now, reasons for rework were not recorded digitally, so it remained unclear what caused it. This is unfortunate because many mistakes could be prevented if you had access to this information. Therefore, we decided to make this information accessible with an application.”

Mendix expertise
Sander continues: “When we started asking around within our organization which party could build an application for us, we quickly ended up at Ciphix through our parent company Royal Van Lent. They had worked with them in the past. Ciphix had built a similar application for them. At the time, they chose them thanks to their extensive experience building low-code applications and the click with the team. That’s why we decided to engage them for this project as well.”

In collaboration with Ciphix, the “Furniture control” app was built in three months. This application is now used for all rework projects. Because the application is both mobile and desktop usable, data can be entered at any location which provides a high degree of flexibility. To start a rework project, all required fields must now be filled in first. As a result, everyone automatically supplies all the required information correctly. Then the request is approved by the Technical Lead and the project is started. All necessary departments, for example the planning department are automatically hooked up in the process.

Solving problems more efficiently
The app has now been in use for about two months. Ten employees from Van Der Loo are using the application and the first results are positive. The departments that have to solve the problems can work together better and more efficiently, because the application makes all the information needed for the rework immediately visible.

Boven addition, it is now easy to analyze any bottlenecks in building the interiors because foremen have to enter the cause of the rework. The handy filter in the app ensures that they can easily filter out the most common causes. Over time, this allows them to work with the departments involved to see how further improvements can be made to the production process. This will ultimately reduce material loss.

Easier returns
New functionality for the application is also currently being worked on in collaboration with a production lead within parent company Royal Van Lent.

A return app should soon make it possible to order needed new materials faster and return wrongly ordered materials to Royal Van Lent faster. For this new application, Ciphix was engaged again. Sander: “I am very happy with the team that took care of the first project for us, so with the help of the Lent support team I was able to engage them again now. Ciphix has a lot of expertise and it’s easy to communicate with them. Of course, it’s nice that they know how the previous application was built, so they can act quickly.”

More insight on what to look out for in the preliminary process
Sander: “This whole project is very instructive for our organization. Thanks to this project, we can really see things going in the right direction. We can now see much better at the back end what is causing rework. This way we know better what to look out for at the beginning of the process, we are going less over budget and our margins are improving. It gives us inspiration for improving the rest of our production processes. Because in the end, we are a production company and that is where our focus lies. We therefore expect to optimize more business processes with low-code in the future so that Van Der Loo will be even more ‘in flow’.”