AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY —
Kamco Industries, a wholly owned subsidiary of Kumi Kasei, is a full-service Honda provider of product design and manufacturer in injection, sheet molded item plan, and Formed Fiber Felt items. The Kumi North America group, with locations in Canada, the United States and Mexico, has accomplished continued growth with combined total annual sales of more than $140 million.
The Challenge
Kamco’s operations include many modern advanced machines and processes to support the automotive industry. Staffed with in-house IT and automation resources, Kamco has been able to leverage existing technologies, including the Plex ERP system. While the team at Kamco is well-versed in modern technology, they had not taken the leap into digital transformation to get all their data in one spot. Metrics and KPIs were available, but not always the most accurate or easy to compile. Additionally, each production line was slow and cumbersome due to how Kamco was managing Honda’s MPR Compliance requirements within Plex. They were losing valuable time to verify part quality and no shipping issues, and were forced to rush their processes in order to begin the next container. With a desire to improve efficiency, performance and throughput as well as make significant upgrades in overall supply chain visibility, Kamco needed an updated digital transformation strategy.
“What we have learned so far about Fuuz is that it’s much more than just a machine integration platform. The built-in capabilities allow us to build and tailor parts of the system to meet additional needs as these needs arise. We can now focus more on business process improvements and less on the standard break fix issues typically prone in manufacturing environments.”
The Solution
Kamco’s IT director spent roughly a year exploring vendors and tools to improve their processes. He worked with Plex to analyze the capabilities and deficiencies of their existing partners compared to Kamco’s needs. Ultimately, the winner would offer a scalable solution that could handle more than just the basic IoT needs, could grow with the company and support long-term goals to integrate other software systems. Fuuz was quickly determined to be the long-term solution, thanks to its on-premise capabilities for pulling data using OPC. The SaaS model of the back end gave the team confidence that it could scale with their future IT plans as well as the ability to solve their customer-specific requirements, such as Honda’s container tracking. Kamco selected Fuuz because of the flexibility of the software, allowing for machine integration with their Cloud ERP provider, Plex Systems, automated print jobs, and simplified data capture.
The Result
Since the initial implementation of Fuuz, Kamco has expanded its use to other facilities with ease. As an IoT solution, Fuuz has given them a platform to build upon and adapt to their changing business climate as needed without constantly having to ask MFGx to make changes to the application. Now, capturing data directly from machines happens in real-time, leaving more time for associates to focus on product quality and meeting or exceeding production targets. They have seen a significant gain in efficiency just by eliminating some of the manual intervention that was required to update their previous ERP system. Since implementing Fuuz, Kamco has been able to improve its bottom line and production efficiency to help with improved schedule attainment.
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