Norm Civata Strenghtens its Sector Position with ERP System
May 2008
How does your ERP system support and enhance your operations in terms of the solutions you offer to the automotive and spare parts industries?
IAS is our solutions partner for ERP technology and our company uses the CANIAS ERP system developed by IAS. We have been using the CANIAS ERP product since 2000. During the product selection stage, we had met with several vendors. In an ideal product selection process, companies should first analyze their own business processes in a detailed manner and should come to a judgement on how well these processes fit with the ERP products they are considering for their businesses. What is really important here is that the company's own self-analysis must be conducted with utmost diligence. Only companies that really know what they want can achieve their goals. After the "as-is" analysis is completed, the business processes supported by the various candidate ERP systems must be compared. Of course, at this point, the flexibility offered by any ERP product is of utmost importance. It cannot be expected that all of the unique requirements of any company can be matched by an ERP system. Therefore, an ERP product must be absolutely flexible to meet your company's requirements. In addition to these factors, technical support from the vendor, as well as the funding allocated for the ERP implementation, are also factors to take into consideration.
Prior to ERP use, it was difficult to gather data
How did you manage and plan your business processes in the pre-ERP days of your company?
In our pre-ERP days, each department used different and separate software applications to run their own business domains. For each business process, a separate software application was in place. Each such application had created its own little island of data. Of course, this made it difficult to obtain access to information. Additionally, the accuracy of the information was questionable, as it could not be verified. And generating reports was a task that was almost next to impossible. Gathering data from multiple and disparate software applications and trying to do reporting through yet another software application were incredibly time consuming, and the results were, to say the least, of dubious nature.
What changes did your organization go through after starting ERP use?
The complete transfer of an organization's business processes over to an ERP system is an effort that takes time. Shortfalls in the analysis of business processes, as well as continuing and changing requests from customers and corporate users, prevent expedient implementation of the business processes within the ERP system. But once the processes are fully implemented, end users observe that business process management is standardized and organized. Business activities become accelerated and errors are minimized. Futhermore, reporting on business processes becomes very convenient to execute.
Which modules of the ERP system did you first deploy, and what stage are you currently at within the overall implementation?
We started our implementation with the Sales, Accounting and Inventory modules. Deployment of these modules was followed by Purchasing, Production, Quality Control, Maintenance, Product Cost Calculation, Human Resources, and the rest. For our reporting needs, we implemented the Data Warehousing and OLAP applications on top of the previously listed modules.
Software for the ERP System should be able to respond to changes
What are some of the problems faced in your industry with respect to the technology systems used?
The single most important challenge we face within the automotive supply business is being able to meet the technology requirements of the primary buyers (i.e. large automakers) in a timely and appropriate manner. All of our customers are continuously improving their operations, updating their systems and are expecting their suppliers to keep up with them. If your software system and application architecture are not flexible enough to respond to such changing business and technology requirements, you are bound to experience problems. Another problem we face is the tremendous amount of data that is being relentlessly generated. Dealing with such large amounts of data requires data entry operations to be automated, which extends application schedules and associated costs.
How does ERP affect the evolving of a business into a professional corporation and the creation of a corresponding brand name?
The very first benefit of ERP is the prestige it brings to our company. We were able to make significant progress in securing our position with our primary customers, the large automakers, by presenting ourselves as a supplier utilizing advanced technology (in the form of ERP). The expectation of the primary automakers from us is not that we simply supply them with parts. You also have to be able to provide them with the right goods at the right time and at the right price, accompanied with proper certifying documentation. That's where the significance of ERP systems come into play. Monitoring of business processes using an ERP system, starting with sales, and leading to purchasing, logistics, manufacturing, planning and finance, have contributed to the sharing, transparency and accuracy of the information employed within the company, and resulted in minimization of errors as well as work loads. Sure, our work load graphics displayed an initial increase at the start, but this has since leveled out in time. After transferring all operational processes onto our ERP system, we have been able to start using analysis capabilities. Being able to run analyses over accurate data originating from the ERP system has resulted in corporate management based entirely on useful information derived from such analyses.
Norm Civata Co. , began bolt production in 1973 with a double-impact machine set. Bolt pin production began in 1977 to meet the demand of the domestic market. With new investments carried out since its inauguration, Norm Civata Co. first moved to its old plant in Bornova in 1976, and in May 1994 to its new and modern plant in the Yzmir Atatürk Organized Industrial Zone where it operates today. The investment began in 1973 with a capacity of 300 tonnes/year, and has now reached 25 000 tonnes/year in bolts and 8 000 tonnes/year in bolt pins.
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