ERP Case Study

Federal-Mogul Motorparts

Location Southfield, Missouri USA

Solution QAD Adaptive ERP

Industry Automotive

QAD Adaptive ERP

Learn More Compare QAD Cloud ERP Software

Federal-Mogul Motorparts Case Study for QAD

The Company: About Federal-Mogul Motorparts

Federal-Mogul (F‑M) Motorparts serves automotive OEMs with products including braking, chassis and windshield wiper applications while also offering a broad portfolio of products through more than 20 of the world’s most recognized brands in the global automotive aftermarket.

F‑M Motorparts is a division of Federal-Mogul LLC, an American developer, manufacturer and supplier of powertrain components and vehicle safety products. Federal-Mogul has received 16 Automotive News PACE (Premier Automotive Suppliers’ Contributions to Excellence) Awards, honoring the company’s superior innovation, technological advancement and business performance. This prestigious award is recognized around the world as the industry benchmark for innovation among automotive suppliers.

The Situation: Customized Reports

The nearly 700 people in the multiple plants of the F‑M Motorparts’ Braking division were using a variety of very customized databases, documentation formats, and business practices in four different QAD systems.

“Manufacturing braking systems is exacting work, it’s one of the biggest safety issues in vehicles,” comments David Gore, IT applications manager for F‑M Motorparts. “During the manufacturing process, there are many specifications that have to be met, measurements and tests that have to be done, and reports completed before we can ship parts to our customers.”

“We had to deal with a variety of customized reports coming from the different locations who were using different business practices,” continues Gore. “All these variations were costing us time, money, and potential to strain customer relationships. We needed to standardize across the division. We needed to eliminate customization as much as possible and have all the Braking division locations using the same business practices, the same processes, and producing reports in the same formats.”

“We didn’t want to have to rework all our customizations so we looked to QAD for help. We knew we were likely not using our core QAD ERP system to its potential and with QAD guidance we discovered some unused functionality and modules that have proved very useful,” adds Gore.

The Solution: QAD Adaptive ERP

With plans already in place to begin an EE upgrade at one of their plants in the UK, the team recognized an opportunity to develop a strategy for consolidating the entire system. A decision was made to begin the rollout at each of the plants beginning with the first plant in the UK. F‑M Motorparts’ Center of Excellence (COE) and the QAD team worked together to explore and examine underutilized solutions that could expand the usability and functionality of their upgraded QAD ERP system even further.

Some of the functionality of QAD EE that was examined and determined to be good choices for the F‑M Motorparts’ Braking division included:

QAD Master Scheduling Workbench (MSW)

Gives F‑M Motorparts’ planners and schedulers simultaneous visibility to plans and schedules, and all supporting data. This enables better control and collaboration across production, and materials planning space for more efficient and effective master scheduling. This results in a greater return on manufacturing assets while reducing lead time and cutting costs.

QAD Operational Metrics

Provides a dashboard of F‑M Motorparts’ vital signs to help make decisions for leaner and more efficient operations. It provides a way to review performance and data quality, allowing problems to be seen in any number of key areas and traced back to the root causes.

QAD Serialization

Integrates F‑M Motorparts’ serialized line-level and operational data, fully supporting key customer requirements for lot and unit-level product tracking. It also simplifies regulatory compliance, manages serialized product, supports chain of custody tracking, and manages packaging down to the smallest sellable unit with unique unit serial numbers.

QAD Q‑Xtend

An application-to-application integration toolset that enables seamless integration between QAD and other enterprise systems without coding. Q‑Xtend automates critical tasks such as data synchronization and eliminates the burden of maintaining custom interfaces and manual data entry. This gives F‑M Motorparts the ability to automate critical data handling and reduce IT costs, all while achieving better data integrity and accessibility.

QAD Financials

QAD’s domain architecture enabled F‑M Motorparts to standardize data across all deployed sites and manage financial reporting across multiple countries and currencies. This has led to a significant reduction in month-end close.

QAD Consignment Inventory

Helps F‑M Motorparts manage consigned inventory from multiple suppliers, as well as F‑M Motorparts’ inventory, consigned to their customers. This includes automatic tracking and location management of all consigned inventory and automatically initiates payments with simplified accounting processes.

QAD Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

Helps F‑M Motorparts effectively manage physical assets by maximizing the use of manufacturing equipment and minimizing repair costs. EAM’s facilitates increased return on investment (ROI) from plant and equipment, and improvement in achieving performance targets for key customer service and fulfillment metrics.

“It was quite an education finding out what additional functionalities could be at our fingertips,” comments Gore. “With QAD’s help, we immediately began the process of building a pilot program.”

The Results: QAD Adaptive ERP Implementation Benefits

F‑M Motorparts worked out best practices as they started incorporating the new QAD ERP functionalities at their UK site. They then took the best practices and started the next implementation at their India site improving upon it even more.

“We now have a road map,” notes Gore, “Next we did our site in Italy and by then had a very robust model that we are using at other sites as we progress through the Braking division. We continue building our knowledge base with each implementation and it has become easier and faster at each site as we continue the process.”

F‑M Motorparts has reduced customization by 50% and has now standardized not only their production processes but also shipping, labeling, finance, packaging, and sales.

“We have a mixing process that in the past was a paperwork order that had no mature traceability but with QAD we now know which material batches went to which production batches making which products. This gives us better information in case there is a safety recall,” adds Gore. “Before it was all paper-based and took many days. Now we can now easily get the data and quickly know the right material with the right batch numbers and more importantly the actual quantities.”

Using Operational Metrics, report requests now come in consistent formats rather than the four or five versions that had to be hand coordinated in the past.

“The Braking division manufactures both OEM and Aftermarket products. We targeted the OEM plants first as they have similar operational strategies,” continues Gore. “Moving to the Aftermarket plant required changes, as their processes are quite different. However, having built up such a robust information base, it is much easier to adapt what we have learned to various operation platforms.”

As F‑M Motorparts continues, all of their Braking sites using QAD will have real time production booking with key milestones resulting in accurate production figures and KPIs for scrap, rejects and daily output by shift and value stream.

“QAD domain architecture enabled us to consolidate all businesses into a single database and deploy common business processes utilizing the full functionality and capabilities of our ERP system.”

David Gore, IT Applications Manager, Federal-Mogul Motorparts

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