Automotive components supplier Piolax is geared to handle rising customer demands and increasingly stringent industry standards through its implementation of a fully-integrated SYSPRO system from K3.
Piolax manufactures industrial fasteners and precision springs for the automotive industry, including clients such as Nissan and Honda. Facing the prohibitive cost of upgrading its largely bespoke Unix-based system, Piolax short-listed five suppliers and opted for a 20-user SYSPRO solution.
Duncan Cornwall, Financial Director of Piolax, says: "We chose SYSPRO because it is a single business system, whereas others were a series of packages bolted together. We have learned from experience that when you bolt software together it is only as good as the weakest link in the sense of development and upgrades."
Piolax holds the TS16949 quality standard required of automotive OEM suppliers, and SYSPRO allows the company to fulfil the requirements of that standard, from manufacturing techniques to the necessary supporting reference manuals.
As an early adopter of wireless bar coding technology, Piolax found its existing system was experiencing increasing delays in the transfer of data as the number of transactions grew. The new SYSPRO system includes the mobile applications module, which allows three-way matching of machines, tools and work orders via a wireless bar coding system.
Some shipments go direct from Piolax to manufacturers' lines and, with the prospect of severe penalties for late deliveries, there is little margin for error. Often faced with hundreds of boxes ready to ship and a truck waiting to leave the factory, the new system facilitates the real-time recording of stock movements, allowing the company to maintain delivery performance at more than 98%. Furthermore, it is future-proofed to allow for further expansion, which suits Piolax's current initiative to increase its warehousing capacity.
SYSPRO's document flow manager (DFM) module allows Piolax customers to call off weekly orders via EDI against a three-month rolling forecast, and for Piolax to issue advanced shipping notices against those weekly orders. Additional efficiencies and cost savings are expected to be introduced through the system's comprehensive document management suite.
Piolax is part of the Japanese-owned Piolax Group, which employs more than 1 000 people across its European, Asian and US operations. SYSPRO is being implemented according to a best practice blueprint, prepared by K3, against the company's existing manufacturing and business processes.
SYSPRO e.NET technology will be used to introduce customisation where necessary, without impeding the upgrade path. It is expected to go live by the second quarter of 2007.
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