Keihin Corporation

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Glovia ERP Provides Foundation for Global Automotive Business

Company Profile

The automotive industry, probably more than any other, depends on a range of component suppliers. Together they constitute one of the biggest supply chains on the planet, delivering millions of vehicles a year to purchasers across every continent.

One major component supplier is the Keihin Corporation, which has manufacturing facilities in Japan, North America, and Canada. It is a principal supplier to Honda, for whom it manufactures fuel systems and electronic controls, as well as heating, ventilating and air conditioning products. Keihin is a long established Japanese company with roots going back to 1950, but the Corporation in its present form derives from a series of mergers in 1997.

In the United States alone, Keihin has annual revenue of around $600 million - and its global turnover runs into billions. This is big business, and information technology is one of the mainstays of that business. "We operate in an intensely competitive industry," says Mike Mitsch, Vice President of Operations at Keihin Aircon, North America. "We have to have information quickly and it must be accurate. Our customer schedules are very fluid - and they become more so by the week, month and year as the car makers try to respond to customer demands."

Back in 1995, Indiana Precision Technology – one of the parties in the 1997 merger – grew rapidly from 300 to 500 employees, and now has over 1200. This made it imperative to change the business processes and to implement an ERP system. They were wasting time and duplicating effort by using standalone PCs running a variety of individually procured applications.

Twelve month research program

"We thought our operation was unique within the industry," says Mitsch, "so we spent 12 months researching our processes and procedures. In parallel with that we began coding based on an existing system in Japan that was to be converted for use in North America." It proved to be a bigger task than they has anticipated, and the main challenge was to integrate a financial system with the manufacturing system. Initially the company began looking for accounting packages that would run on their Oracle database development platform.