How a Global Auto Parts Manufacturer Centralized Multi-Plant Scheduling and Cut Production Delays by 20%

Client Overview: Precision Auto Components

Precision Auto Components (PAC) is a Tier-1 supplier to major automotive OEMs, specializing in high-tolerance engine and transmission parts. With annual revenues exceeding $350 million, PAC operates four specialized manufacturing plants across the United States and Mexico. Each facility functions as a distinct profit center, with its own production planning team, legacy systems, and operational workflows. This decentralized structure, once a driver of agility, had become a significant bottleneck, hindering growth and impacting relationships with key customers due to inconsistent delivery performance.

The Problem: Disconnected Operations in a High-Stakes Industry

PAC's core challenge was a complete lack of centralized visibility. Production scheduling was managed in a chaotic mix of spreadsheets, homegrown Access databases, and outdated MRP modules. Planners at one facility had no real-time insight into the capacity, inventory levels, or production status of the other plants. This led to frequent stock-outs of shared components, last-minute (and expensive) expedited shipping, and an inability to shift production loads to optimize capacity across the enterprise. The executive team was flying blind, relying on month-old reports to make critical decisions, while the shop floor dealt with the daily chaos of shifting priorities and material shortages.

Key Challenges

• Data Silos: Each plant operated as an information island, preventing any form of coordinated planning or optimization.
• Manual Scheduling Overload: Planners spent over 60% of their time manually updating spreadsheets and reacting to disruptions, rather than proactively planning.
• Inability to Optimize Capacity: An overloaded plant in Ohio might be turning down orders while a plant in Mexico had available machine time, but no one had the visibility to balance the workload.
• Poor On-Time Delivery (OTD): OTD rates had fallen to a dangerous 82%, threatening major OEM contracts and incurring significant penalty fees.

Our Solution: A Unified, AI-Powered Scheduling Hub

ArionERP implemented a phased rollout of its AI-enhanced ERP, focusing first on the modules that would deliver the most immediate impact. The core of the solution was creating a single source of truth for all four plants, enabling advanced, centralized scheduling.

1. Centralized Data Platform: We integrated data from all four plants into a single ArionERP instance, providing a unified, real-time view of inventory, work-in-progress (WIP), and machine availability across the entire organization.
2. Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) Engine: We deployed our APS module, which uses AI algorithms to analyze constraints (materials, machine capacity, labor) and generate optimized production schedules for all facilities simultaneously.
3. Real-Time Shop Floor Connectivity: IoT connectors were installed on critical machinery to feed live production data directly into ArionERP, ensuring schedules were based on up-to-the-second reality, not outdated estimates.
4. Executive Dashboards & Analytics: We configured custom Power BI dashboards, integrated with ArionERP, to give the executive team unprecedented, real-time visibility into key metrics like Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), capacity utilization, and OTD rates.

The Results: From Reactive Firefighting to Proactive Optimization

The implementation of ArionERP transformed PAC's operations from a collection of disconnected silos into a synchronized, efficient manufacturing network. The results were clear, measurable, and impactful.