Lear Corporation:

Together with Lear Corporation's MTO Division, PICS assisted in the successful completion of a major upgrade throughout facilities located in El Paso Texas, Plymouth Indiana, and Juarez Mexico. The MTO division manufactures seat covers for companies such as Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota and others. They are also a tier 2 supplier to other Lear JIT plants as well as other external suppliers and support service demands and dealer direct requirements.

The goal of the Project Team was not only to upgrade their current implementation, but also to utilize standard QAD Enterprise Applications ( MFG/PRO ) functionality as a replacement to custom programs that were developed and implemented over the years. The previousQAD Enterprise Applications ( MFG/PRO ) version 7.3 with over 1000 custom programs was upgraded to eB in 6 months throughout the six manufacturing and distribution facilities. Two additional plants were upgraded from version 8.6 to eB in the months immediately following.

Project highlights include:

• A common manufacturing process was developed to support the lamination, leather cutting and sewing operations utilizing the WIP Lot Trace functionality within the Advanced Repetitive module in QAD Enterprise Applications ( MFG/PRO ) eB.
• Improved lot traceability and material visibility was achieved throughout the system by utilizing Eagle RF Express and WIP Lot Trace.
• Lear and PICS worked together with Eagle to develop an RF Express backflush transaction for WIP Lot Trace that allows the accurate recording of component material usage. This allowed tracking of actual material usage variance in the cutting process.
• By increasing the utilization of RF Express for QAD Enterprise Applications ( MFG/PRO ) throughout the process, the need to allow negative inventory balances was eliminated by allowing users to perform transactions in real time.
• Implementing Global Shipping functionality in the inventory transfer transactions allowed Lear to eliminate a cumbersome Distribution Order/Inter-Site request process. DRP is now used for planning purposes and Global Shipping functionality is used to transfer the materials between sites and produce shipper documentation suitable for customs transport to and from Mexico and the U.S.
• By using Global Shipping functionality for enhancing Shippers, additional data elements required for customs are now captured. An export of the QAD Enterprise Applications ( MFG/PRO )shipper that is loaded into customs software used by Lear was written. This replaced an existing manual process of retyping this information into the customs software.