Wagon Automotive Pressings Division, a Tier 1 supplier of pressings to leading vehicle manufacturers, has chosen System 21 software from global business software supplier JBA. JBA will provide its automotive sector specific financials, customer service & logistics and manufacturing software, along with products from within its @ctive Enterprise series of products to support Wagon`s lb1,000,000 integration of five businesses. The pilot site, at Wantage in Oxfordshire, is scheduled to go live in the first half of 1999.
To date, the five companies in the group have not operated collectively, using a variety of IT systems, which have required significant manual effort. Each company carried out its own finance, engineering, purchasing and manufacturing operations.
Wagon Automotive Pressings aims to grow significantly over the next few years by integrating its operations; introducing a single, integrated IT system and improving its entire supply chain operations. Wagon has redesigned its core business processes and reduced its non-value-added activities. The re-designed processes have been mapped into @ctive modeler, a development tool, which will define levels of process automation, such as automatic schedule reconciliation to reduce costs, improve customer service , as well as to provide better management control information.
Wagon is one of the largest suppliers within the UK automotive pressings industry. It supplies presswork (flanges, hinges, cross members and supporting parts) across Europe to Volkswagen, Ford, Rover, Honda, Toyota and Nissan, as well as to many Tier 1 suppliers.
Stephen Spiers, director of business re-engineering and IT at Wagon, says: "JBA`s @ctive Enterprise strategy provides an answer to our changing needs. To go forward we have to radically redefine our whole business, and discontinue some activities that don
`t add value, but first we have to analyse our critical processes. @ctive modeler will allow us to formalise the definition of our processes, and help map the software functionality to the remodelled processes we need, thereby simplifying the system configuration phase of the implementation. No other vendor, at the time of our review, could provide such an integrated and innovative approach to business process improvement."
JBA was chosen due to the high degree of proven automotive industry functionality within its software, which included customer and vendor scheduling, tooling control and demand forecasting. JBA can also supply good support and development in the other are as that Wagon operates, e.g. in the Czech Republic. JBA`s good coverage throughout Europe will be able to support the division`s future growth.
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JBA South Africa (Pty) Limited, is the South African subsidiary of JBA International Plc, which in turn owned by London Stock Exchange listed JBA Holdings, a leading world-wide provider of enterprise management software solutions, with local offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban.
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