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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Trelleborg Wheel Systems brings control to global production through data-driven integration approach. |
It was about three years ago, but Fabio Gloria remembers the pain as if it were yesterday. His company, Trelleborg Wheel Systems, was moving its headquarters from Sweden to Italy, and executives wanted production and sales data from the entire business unit -- no small task given the expansive geographic and technological range of the organization. Trelleborg Wheel Systems, a manufacturer of agricultural and industrial tires, operates five factories in Denmark, Italy, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the United States. Each site has an IBM Corp. (Armonk, NY) AS/400 running different variations of Intentia International AB's (Stockholm, Sweden) Movex enterprise management software. Many of the company's sales offices, however, run Microsoft Corp.'s (Redmond, WA) Navision enterprise resource planning (ERP). Trying to bring order to the array of applications was Gloria's first challenge. The second, more logistical problem was Sri Lanka's poor Internet access. Despite Trelleborg's virtual private network (VPN), connectivity instability made data acquisition difficult. [Click to continue] |