Wire Harness & Cable Assembly

Wire Harness & Cable Assembly

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 manufacturing-centric ERP platform that is both powerful and 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 obstacle of training new employees on old technology, Buse knew they needed to upgrade their enterprise systems.

“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. This creates challenges to plan production, schedule stock requirements, and anticipate problems.

Cetec ERP’s robustness, feature breadth, and flexible design supported Buse’s custom manufacturing requirements. Cetec modeled an automated scheduling approach that could flex and adapt to Buse’s quick turn environment. Work cells and production lines were implemented to act as “small companies”; if a work center is too busy, production 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, CEO at Buse Industries

Buse Industries Project Success and Cloud ERP Benefits

Buse claims the biggest advantage to implementing Cetec ERP is having everything in their business under one roof, from CRM to order entry to production to quality to engineering and product management. The complete cycle now lives in a single database, with less need to rely on separate systems.

• Customer service can locate RMAs and see status for quotes and customer accounts without depending on a handful of super users.
• With employee turnover, teams can pick up where others left off because everyone is working from the same operational record.
• Operations data is shared across departments, reducing back-and-forth and improving day-to-day execution.

Product Traceability & Customer Satisfaction

Buse streamlined lot and serial control with a cloud based inventory tracking approach and barcode scanning, improving both accuracy and efficiency.

Buse was awarded best in class for product traceability by a key customer, based on the ability to quickly prove material source traceability (lot and serial control) and production traceability (who worked on what order, when it was done, who QC’d it, when it shipped, and what products were used).