Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Accuride was built through a series of acquisitions, with businesses and facilities brought together with disparate IT systems and processes. The company had seven different ERP systems, additional systems for quality and maintenance, and a heavy reliance on Excel and paper.

In total, Accuride was running more than 200 different software applications. Business units didn’t know if data they were using to make business decisions was current or correct. This led to countless person hours and capital wasted on analyzing data that could possibly be out of date or incorrect.

Accuride’s aim was to become an industry leader. That initiative depended upon finding a solution that could help them shift to lean manufacturing practices, combining agility and exceptional productivity on the shop floor. They also needed to capture and manage data to deliver a “single version of the truth,” for consistent data company-wide.  All this had to be accomplished with minimal investment and headcount.

The Solution

Adopting a “Fix & Grow” strategy, Accuride invested more than $150 million to build industry-leading operations to provide a platform for growth, innovation and profitable performance. Key to the program is a comprehensive transformation of Accuride’s use of technology, coupled with the move to lean.

Accuride spent months evaluating several systems, including Infor, SAP and Oracle. While these solutions offered traditional ERP functionality at an enterprise-level, manufacturing elements like machine integration and quality management required additional investment in separate tools.

Accuride selected the Plex Manufacturing Cloud based on three core requirements: the ability to fully automate all manufacturing processes, the ability to provide real-time decision support and accurate accounting for the whole business, and the opportunity to leverage continuous innovation without a huge IT investment.

The results

SHOP FLOOR TRANSFORMATION: Accuride has increased productivity, automated processes and integrated workflows at 7 manufacturing facilities. Workflows are more fluid as tasks on the shop floor are tracked and reassigned at a moment’s notice. Managers no longer need to be in the office or connected to a VPN to oversee work – operations are accessible in real time via essentially any modern mobile device. This has enabled Accuride to invest new energy into product innovation: their Aluminum wheels now set the industry standard for weight, durability and appearance.

ENTERPRISE VISIBILITY: All Accuride activities and the data they produce are now linked so the company can see in real-time what is happening within each plant and across the organization. Accuride can get data for all purchasing and link it to transactional activities on the floor (production or maintenance), and integrate that data with quality information and shipping, ultimately helping Accuride to respond nimbly and cost efficiently to customers.

THIRD-PARTY SATISFACTION: Accuride’s lean approach has allowed the company to simplify operations while still meeting the needs of customers, assuring a premium quality product, delivered consistently on time, at a reasonable cost. As a result, customer satisfaction is soaring and the company can make strategic decisions such as which facility to use to service a given customer based on real-time inventory, COGS, location, etc.

Metrics

SHOP FLOOR TRANSFORMATION: Accuride shares information in the secure Plex cloud with suppliers and customers. Stakeholders across the globe log into the system from any internet device, resulting in:

• Time for jobs like hardware requisitions (the ordering and fulfillment of necessary supplies) has gone from days down to 30 minutes or fewer.
• The elimination of spreadsheet releases and email to suppliers. They all now have real-time visibility via a web portal.
• Automation of schedules in the Plex plants, removing spreadsheets and other outdated information from the shop floor.

ENTERPRISE VISIBILITY: Before Plex, Accuride suffered from inefficiency and data variances from location to location, (such as inconsistent naming conventions for parts). By adopting a single system of record, the organization achieved:

• The standardization of the monthly operating package for each plant, saving 40 hours of work per month.
• Reducing inventory by millions of dollars while still improving delivery responsiveness, leveraging the visibility of all interplant requirements and inventory across the enterprise.

THIRD-PARTY SATISFACTION: Accuride has been able to improve the efficiency of its facilities, improving all of its supplier and customer metrics. This has led to:

• The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) presenting Accuride’s Henderson, KY, wheel plant with a 2014 Manufacturing Excellence Award, one of only four plants in North America to be so honored.

The Technology

Accuride deployed Plex across 7 of its 9 operations with plans to deploy in 2 more facilities within the next year.

Plex supports all major manufacturing functions and the ERP backbone for Accuride, including system/machine integration, shop and workforce mobility.

Disruptive Factor

Through the course of the implementation, Accuride has created disruption and transformation both inside and outside of the organization. Accuride’s IT team transformed from troubleshooters into IT analysts, as even junior members became strategic advisors to senior executives and decision-makers.

By leveraging Plex to access plant floor data, Accuride has leaped ahead of their competitors due to their ability to quickly make important, data-driven decisions that impact the lifeblood of the organization.

As a heavily audited manufacturing organization, accessibility to standardized data means that the right answer to any given question is just clicks away instead of requiring hundreds of man hours digging through piles of spreadsheets.

With quality built right into the system, Accuride knows exactly which quality checks were performed on which product and at what time. Problems are easily identified and addressed instantly rather than after the fact, which saves crucial time and money.

And while the transformation within the walls of Accuride’s facilities has been dramatic, the impact it will have on manufacturing as a whole proves to be even more compelling as Accuride raises the standards throughout the industry. Over time, Accuride has emerged as a leader within the greater Plex community of 400 manufacturers that operate 1,300 facilities across 20 countries, regularly providing counsel to other manufacturers with the goal of improving the industry as a whole.

Shining Moment

An auditor recently toured an Accuride facility and asked how Accuride measured complex quality indicators like production variations. To the auditor’s disbelief, Accuride answered that all were measured using Plex.

The plant’s finance lead also shared that Plex helped shorten its month-end close to just 3 days. The auditor asked how this was possible, noting that “ERP doesn’t do this.”

The team logged into Plex and proved otherwise.