Volvo Turned to Apriso for Global Flexibility and Consistency

Volvo CE manufactures tractors, excavators, pavers, and other construction gear. Scott Park, Vice President of operations process and systems, is also the company’s CIO. With operations and IT his purview, Park was suited to match IT ideas with business processes. “It was business-driven,” Park says.

But Park felt SAP, didn’t have enough flexibility to support the idiosyncratic differences and sudden manufacturing process changes across 17 globally scattered plants. “Processes have to be dynamic, flexible, changeable at a moment’s notice,” he says. If a supplier wanted to change its synchronized delivery of a part to an assembly line at one plant but not at others, SAP was not able to do that easily. Or, a factory developed a best practice that benefits 16 other factories, Park wanted software that could easily disseminate changes.

Apriso’s FlexNet, supports rapid deployment of new procedures through its “center of excellence” module. “You can literally define the process in the center of excellence and deploy it at the flick of a switch,” Park says.

“We chose the most complex and largest plant first,” Park says. Volvo’s Changwon South Korea’s deployment took seven months. Subsequent implementations have taken three months. The company is planning three additional implementations in 2010. By 2012 Volvo hopes to install in 12 of 17 factories.

“We’re seeing transparently where best practices are, and we’ll be able to deploy and do something about that globally,” Park says. “We can get the innovative juices flowing.”

FlexNet centrally disperses manufacturing changes and is a key reason Park chose Apriso, along with the comparative ease of integrating to SAP. FlexNet feeds SAP ERP information about supply levels as well as performance and quality of parts and manufacturing lines. Information alerts suppliers for shipping adjustments or to address quality issues. The integration has improved supply chain and plant efficiencies, giving factories a “high degree of accuracy in inventory, bill of materials, and utilization of materials,” Park says.

“ROI is huge,” he says. “It’s not so much an ROI calculation; it’s more a strategy discussion. We didn’t sell this based on ROI,” Park says. “Once our strategic objective was accepted and approved, you could say it turned into a global mandate.”