"As PBR expanded its business globally, we required a solution that could be deployed wherever business may take us.We felt Infor would help us achieve these objectives." – Mark Laudiani, IT Manager

Company Overview
PBR International, based in Melbourne, Australia, has been in the automotive industry for more than 70 years. Throughout this time, PBR has set world-class standards for brake products and application technology, and has become a key supplier to leading vehicle and vehicle system manufacturers around the world.

PBR has five manufacturing facilities throughout the world, annual revenue of $600 million (1.1 billion AUD) (numbers need updating), and approximately 1,950 employees. The Melbourne facility manufactures full braking systems for passenger vehicle customers such as Ford, Holden, Mitsubishi and Toyota. The U.S.-based facilities in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Columbia, South Carolina, produce calipers and brake products for sports cars, medium-sized passenger cars, and large and light trucks for customers such as GM, Ford Motor Co., Delphi, and American Axle & Manufacturing. The company's Asian facilities, in Malaysia and Thailand, supply brake products to Proton in Malaysia, Ford-Mazda in Thailand, and Daewoo in Korea.

PBR believes in the challenge of achieving continuous innovation. Dependability through innovation is what PBR does better than the competition. The company continually finds more innovative ways in everything it does, from pure research through design and engineering, to manufacturing processes, packaging and distribution.

"Dependability is such a crucial word in the automotive industry. It is what has driven PBR in recent times. It is behind our objective of Zero Defects, Zero Accidents and Zero Unplanned Downtime," says John McCarthy, PBR CIO.

The Situation
Prior to implementing the Infor solution, PBR relied on a legacy system that was written in-house in the early 1960s, was not Y2Kcompliant, and was being pushed to accommodate four different sources of information. With information from disparate sources to handle, the outdated legacy system had become too large to maintain and run efficiently. This consolidation forced the IT staff to make all four systems interact in order to maintain proper and accurate process flows, including those involved in materials resource planning (MRP).

It quickly became imperative to replace this inefficient and outdated system. PBR considered some of the big-name solution providers, but quickly eliminated them because of expense and lengthy implementation time. The selection team decided that Infor was the best fit for PBR's needs because the solution would meet all of the company's requirements within budget and time constraints. In addition, Infor would enable PBR to run its enterprise on an IBM iSeries platform, which was important because the manufacturer had a long, happy history of working with IBM products. The ability to meet all of PBR's requirements made Infor the logical choice.

"Our future required us to apply lean approaches to IT as well as the rest of the business. We needed to do more with less," explains Mark Laudiani, IT Manager. "We needed a solution that could help us respond to customer requirements, and provide a solid foundation for growth, while at the same time, be managed by a far smaller IT Team. As PBR expanded its business globally, we required a solution that could be deployed wherever business may take us. We felt Infor would help us achieve these objectives."

The Solution
Since being implemented throughout the PBR enterprise, Infor has become the core of the company's business solution. The company views Infor as its 'master storehouse' because it holds all the critical business and product information on which the other solutions run.

It is essential that PBR be able to communicate with customers and suppliers all over the world on information regarding orders, shipping, forecasting, invoicing and payments-all the normal, day-to-day business functions. This requires not only the critical data stored in Infor, but also a tight integration between Infor and other supporting applications.

"One of the key differentiators between PBR and our competitors is our innovation and quality. This relates not just to our products, but our whole business, from manufacturing processes, logistics and distribution through to IT. Infor is a key part of our quality and innovation processes," says McCarthy.

"What I like most about the Infor solution is its ease of use. The information I need is at my fingertips. Infor flexibility enables me to tailor and fine tune planning parameters very easily to help planning 6,500 end items," add Chris Nicholson

Infor has also helped PBR do business internationally in a number of ways.

The company is now able to deploy solutions from two servers on opposite sides of the globe. This approach has saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars when deploying Infor into new locations.

Visibility to information globally is a key need in business and is a new focus area for PBR. One part of that is having key personnel able to view our financial results, and be able to drill down to the detail where required, and allowed. PBR is able to do this with financial reports tailored to department heads needs, published via the web, to enable access at any time and anywhere.

"Our next steps include examining options for customer self service systems. EDI has certainly reduced the load on our Customer Service Department, but we are always looking for ways to improve the way we can help our customers become more productive," concludes Nicholson.

Real Results

• Reduced inventory costs by 30 percent
• Decreased the time needed to run an accurate MRP report to only two to three hours
• Reduced IT headcount by 60 to 70 percent
• Increased profitability by minimizing the time parts are in production to two to three days
• Eliminated the need for paper in the purchasing process which enables purchasing and accounts payable teams to manage both procurement and payment 100% online
• Improved delivery performance to consistently meet 100% on time delivery targets at the same time achieving zero parts per million (PPM) defects
• Reduced IT expenditures to 0.7% of revenues, whereas, the norm in automotive manufacturing according to Gartner is around 1.2%