Customer Solution Profiles

Kobe CH Wire Co., Ltd.

About:
KCH is a Cold-Heading-Quality-Wire Manufacturer created from a Japanese-Thai joint venture. Its major stakeholder is KOBE STEEL LTD., one of Japan's leading steel makers. KCH has been growing rapidly, with the 2004 production capacity running at 2,000 tons per month. 90% of its production supplies Thailand's growing automobile Industry and 10% to other Industries.

The Situation:
Because of recent rapid growth in KCH business, internal management processes have to be developed and streamlined to respond to customer's expectations. Management decided that the best strategy was to deploy information technology to help improve enterprise's performance and eliminate duplicating and non-value added activities. Thus a search for the right IT solution began two years ago.

KCH products are wires with enormous varieties in grade, size, and chemical composition. More than 90% of KCH customers are in the auto industry orders whose order patterns vary considerably. Thus, the software needs to allow KCH to efficiently manage and control inventory, effectively plan production, and perform the necessary quality control and traceability process all the way down to each steel heat and JIS standard grades. These are fundamental requirements that the software must able to support. Moreover, the software must provide integrate data from every department and reduce data duplication and inconsistency within the company.

The Solution:
Verticent ERP Plus was able to support all of KCH requirements. The system is used to support raw materials and finished goods items, bills of materials, inventory, production, and sales information. In the case of managing raw material purchase, Verticent system can store purchase history and material receipts, making it easy to track order status and improve raw material inventory balance and material requirements. In controlling inventory, in addition to its ability to record and report inventory by item code and location, users can list items by chemical compositions as well.

Most KCH orders are made-to-order that require specific raw material items. The Verticent ERP Plus work order system served this need very well by allowing easy selection of items that are tied to specific bill of materials for each coil and heat lot control. If the order does not use standard bill of materials, the Verticent system allows easy modification of each work order. For order tracking, Verticent's ERP Plus provides real-time order status such as order quantity, completed quantity, and quantity remained in each manufacturing process. The Finite shop report allows easy tracking and accurate reporting and allows management to easily review the shop performance and efficiency.

The system is also very flexible, making it easy to customize and address customer specific needs such as issuing product certificates, which contain detailed description on each production coil, as well as various forms of metal tags such as sample tag or wire tag that accompanies the product delivered to the customer.

 

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