Case Study: John Cotton Group achieves modern, reliable production and reduced business risk with Lighthouse Systems' Shopfloor-Online

John Cotton Replaces Legacy Shop Floor Systems with Lighthouse MES

John Cotton Group, a leading UK supplier of duvets and pillows producing up to 125,000 duvets and 290,000 pillows per week, faced a critical business risk from an ageing bespoke COBOL manufacturing system that was fragile, hard to support and blocking future development. Seeking an off‑the‑shelf MES to replace the legacy software, John Cotton Group selected Lighthouse Systems’ Shopfloor-Online because it matched their functional requirements and committed to a shop‑floor‑centric implementation approach.

Lighthouse Systems implemented Shopfloor-Online modules for scheduling, material requisitions, job setup, automatic PLC data capture, quality checks, spoilage recording, barcode printing and SAP uploads, running an iterative pilot and a smooth February 2009 cutover. The result: all nine lines now use Shopfloor-Online as the backbone of production with no adverse impact on output during switchover, consolidated real‑time visibility of production data, reduced support risk from the legacy system, and a platform for future expansion (maintenance module, weight‑trending), while continuing to support the plant’s high weekly volumes.

John Cotton Group

Chris Earl

Group IT Manager