Accuride Corporation

The Company: About Accuride Corporation

Headquartered in Evansville, Indiana, Accuride Corporation is a leading supplier of wheels and wheel-end components to the North American and European commercial vehicle markets. The company serves all major segments of the commercial vehicle market including manufacturers of heavy-duty and medium-duty trucks, commercial trailers, light trucks, buses as well as specialty and military vehicles. Accuride products are manufactured in facilities throughout North America and Europe. 

The Situation: Diversified Product Portfolio

• Difficulty getting a comprehensive picture of how operations were performing with seven disparate systems. 
• Spend a lot of time and resources gathering and questioning the data instead of using it to make decisions. 
• A diversified product portfolio that needed streamlining with better operational support. 
• Lack of enterprise-wide visibility, decision-making, and negotiating power. 

The Solution: Plex Manufacturing Cloud ERP

• Improved supply chain productivity time by 10%. 
• Reduced hardware requisition time from days to 30 minutes. 
• Ships within 3 hours for production lines that run 15 to 20 different part numbers per day. 
• Won 2014 Manufacturing Excellence Award from the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) for Henderson, Kentucky wheel plant. 

The Results: Plex Manufacturing Cloud ERP Implementation Benefits

The Plex Manufacturing Cloud ticked many boxes for Accuride, providing all the processes the firm required from the shop floor to the top floor; everything from supply chain management to production scheduling, quality management to shipping, and inventory management. 

“With Plex, all our activities and the data they produce are linked so that we can see in real-time what is really happening in our business,” notes Wright. ​“For example, we can get data for all direct and indirect purchasing and link that to transactional activities on the floor whether that’s production or maintenance, and integrate that with quality information and shipping. This kind of flexibility means we can move away from more traditional logistics arrangements to using Kanbans inside the system, and that will help us to be more nimble and able to react rapidly to customer demands.”

With the ​“Grow” portion of its business strategy firmly in mind, Accuride found Plex’s unique approach to licensing very appealing, paying for the solution as a percentage of revenue rather than on a per-user basis. This was a crucial selection factor because making an ERP tool available for everyone was essential. 

Wright again: ​“With Plex, we were able to step into multiple modules in one go. Because it’s so connected within one database it’s easy to make logical steps from MRO into maintenance and then quality into production and shipping, meaning the Plex Manufacturing Cloud can rapidly transform how we work.”