Case: Bel Power Solutions – a holistic approach to business intelligence

Electronics manufacturer Bel Fuse has around 7,000 employees located on six of the seven continents and manufacturing sites all over the world. Bel Power Solutions, which provides power conversion devices, is one of the firm’s three business groups.

As a result of several recent acquisitions, Bel Fuse had been trying to manage the multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems it inherited. This made it incredibly difficult to carry out financial processes, so Bel addressed this with the implementation of a Microsoft ERP system.

Following the decision for a more modern and unified ERP system and the acquisition of power solutions provider Power One in 2014, Bel Power Solutions had inherited a product lifecycle management (PLM) system which it hoped would improve business organisation, enhance its proposition in a competitive market and continue its growth. Unfortunately, there were many issues with this system. Firstly, the licensing fees were priced per user and had become too costly as the company grew. The system was also a standalone product outside of the ERP system, which made it extremely cumbersome to work with the two systems simultaneously, and so Bel Power Solutions felt there was room for improvement.

Throughout its transformation, Bel Power Solutions was having to stay on top of its vast quantity of products and manufacturing changes. With around 10,000 finished goods and between 300 and 3,000 components on the bill of materials for each, a PLM system that could effectively deal with these would improve the firm’s integrity, enhance change management and route work to the right people to ensure a high level of product quality and communication between departments.

Bel Power Solutions decided to deploy Bluestar PLM to handle all change management and product documentation. It also controls Bel Power Solutions’ compliance management. The company finds many benefits on the PLM transition with Bluestar, most importantly the fact that PLM is inside their ERP system, thus securing a holistic approach to business intelligence.

• Engineering Solution: CAD Link
• Compliance Management
• Change Management
• Product documentation
• Seamless data flow
• Full integration with existing ERP system
• Error reduction

We have implemented Bluestar PLM for more than hundreds of enterprises and world-wide 10,000 users. Following implementations, we have evaluated on our customers’ user experiences and benefits achieved from having our system onboard. These evaluations have given us great examples of the results gained from Bluestar PLM inside Dynamics 365/AX.