Electronics assembly and wire harness manufacturers require precise tracking of production and thousands of inventory SKUs. Manufacturing is typically quick turn and custom, with extensive engineering requirements and constantly changing customer demands. Such an environment is challenging, and requires a superious cloud business solution that is manufacturing centric, and powerful as it is flexible.
Success Story: Buse Industries
Buse Industries builds electro-mechanical assemblies, distributes a variety of connectors, wire, cable, and related accessories, and provides an array of services including manufacturing, inventory management, sourcing, engineering support, and kitting.
In a 120 employee company, there were around 12 super users familiar with Buse’s aged, complicated ERP platform, and the rest of the company were dependent on those users for the lifeblood of the business. With projected growth, and the painful obstacle of training new employees on old technology, Buse knew that they needed to upgrade their enterprise systems to a modern IT solution.
“Most other cloud ERP providers we looked at simply did not offer strong production tracking. The quote un-quote ‘manufacturing’ capabilities they offered was vaporware. Cetec ERP is the real deal.” - John Horgan, CEO at Buse Industries
Why did Cetec ERP make sense for a company in Wire Harness & Cable Assembly?
Buse operates a high-mix, low volume shop, where all work orders are custom, with customer specified material, posing extraordinary challenges to plan production, schedule stock requirements, and anticipate problems.
Cetec ERP’s robustness, vast feature breadth, and flexible design proved useful for custom manufacturing requirements. Cetec elegantly modeled an automated scheduling system that could flex and adapt as needed to Buse’s quick turn environment. Work cells and production lines were implemented to act as “small companies”; Buse production management can easily see in Cetec, if a work center is too busy, they can offload onto another and stay efficient and on time.
“Businesses are by nature reactive, but most successes you see in manufacturing excellence are a result of being proactive. We chose a change of mindset, to move from the reactive status quo to being proactive. A superior, forward looking cloud manufacturing ERP system was an essential aspect of this change.” - John Horgan.
Buse Industries Project Success and Cloud ERP Benefits
Buse claims the biggest advantage to implementing Cetec ERP is having everything in their business finally under one roof, from CRM to Order Entry to Production to Quality to Engineering and product management. The complete cycle is under one umbrella, in a single database, and there is no longer any need to go anywhere else.
CSR personnel at Buse can now find where their RMAs are; they can find the exact status of any quote or customer account; they do not have to talk to anyone, it is all at their fingertips easily accessible within the Cetec ERP system.
Facing employee turnover, Buse staff can simple pickup right where others left off; everyone has access to the same ultimate database; everyone is on the same page.
Product Traceability & Customer Satisfaction
Buse was also able to streamline lot and serial control with their cloud based inventory tracking solution, enjoying benefits of both controlled accuracy and also efficiency via the use of barcode scanning.
Recently, Buse Industries was awarded best in class for product traceability by one of their most important customers, for the ability to quickly and easily prove both material source traceability (lot and serial control), and also production traceability (who worked on what order, when it was done, who QC’d it, when it shipped, what products were used on it, etc.)