Bracalente

The Company: About Bracalente

Bracalente Manufacturing Group (BMG) is a U.S.-based contract manufacturer of precision-machined parts and assemblies. Founded in 1950, the family-owned and operated company’s advanced engineering and manufacturing capabilities cover initial design, production, packaging, and shipping. Today, BMG delivers its manufacturing and supply chain management services to global customers in the aerospace, medical, energy, automotive, industrial, agricultural, ordnance, and oil and gas sectors. 

The Situation: Standardize Operations

In 2009, the company established a manufacturing presence in China to further develop and manage its global manufacturing solutions. Located in Suzhou — just west of Shanghai — the BMG-China facility serves U.S. customers with a presence in Asian markets, as well as new customers based in China.

BMG has generated significant returns by ensuring its Chinese subsidiary delivers the same impressive engineering, production, and advanced supply chain management services as its U.S. operations. Today, BMG-China has attained an annual turnover of more than 10 million U.S. dollars and continues to enjoy fast-paced growth. However, the rapid evolution of their global business meant BMG needed to upgrade its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to handle increasingly complex end-to-end operations.

“We deployed our first Epicor ERP solution back in 1998 to address purely domestic business challenges,” explained Scott Keaton, vice president, and CFO at BMG. ​“A decade later, following global growth of the business, we extended the solution. As a result, our U.S. and Chinese operations were utilizing Epicor platforms to enable the synchronized management of procurement, planning, scheduling, and more. With an eye to the future and with the business continuing to change and evolve at a rapid rate we needed to upgrade our ERP capabilities and initiate a new ERP platform that could handle our next phase of growth.”

Challenges

• Streamline and standardize operations across multiple geographies

• Simplify the management of in-country legal, taxation, and accounting standards 

• Achieve a single, transparent view into global operations

The Solution: Epicor ERP

Dedicated to the lean manufacturing principles of reducing waste, lead times, and costs for their customers, BMG wanted a more advanced Epicor ERP platform for greater integration of key processes.

“The consulting team from Epicor engineered a comprehensive system deployment that was tailored to address all our pain points. Drawing on a deep understanding of our business, they used modeling and simulation scenarios to demonstrate how the system would operate in our factories,” mentioned Keaton.

By closely collaborating with BMG project leaders during implementation, Epicor included the enhanced data and process standardizations that BMG needed to coordinate and optimize their global operations.

“Once again, Epicor demonstrated its strength in this field by giving us a feature-rich and highly targeted solution that no other ERP vendor could offer,” added Keaton.

The Results: Epicor ERP Implementation Benefits

The new, highly integrated Epicor ERP solution has enabled a common system process that enables BMG to communicate quickly with customers and suppliers no matter where they are in the world. The upgraded ERP system has empowered BMG to optimize its data analysis and reporting services delivering improved information visibility and timely data sharing.

This localization facility has enabled BMG personnel to break through language barriers and initiate a more unified approach to decision-making and innovative joint-working approaches. The new platform also contains a visualized business process management designer that makes it easier for BMG to build and quickly deploy new business processes that improve overall operational efficiency.

“The new ERP solution from Epicor has helped us find and resolve problems quickly. We particularly like the inventory function of the system, because it enables us to track the movement of parts in the entire production line with each step being clear and accurate,” said Casey.

The company is now planning to implement Epicor MES data collection stations at its Chinese operation to capture real-time work-in-progress data. This move will boost manufacturing execution capabilities and drive further efficiencies.

“Epicor provides empowering solutions that have given us fresh momentum for achieving enterprise growth and performance excellence. As a company, we’re committed to innovations that yield enhanced efficiencies and less environmental impact and Epicor helps us to stay relevant, think bigger, and take a long-term view,” concluded Keaton.

Results and Benefits

• Unified information flows enhanced decision-making across the business

• Enabled business process reengineering with a global perspective 

• Fully aligned operations in U.S. and China with consistent, end-to-end business and costing practices