Customer Success Story

Genuine Parts Company

Established in a small engineering workshop in Atlanta in the 1930s, Genuine Parts Company (GPC) (previously Rayloc) has grown to become one of the most widely known engineering, cataloguing, sourcing and distribution companies in the world.

Background

Today Genuine Parts Company provides high quality, application-specific products such as brake pads, brake drums and bearings to the National Automotive Parts Association (NAPA) and its customers, using its wealth of expertise in global sourcing, engineering and distribution. This is supported by over 500 employees operating across GPC’s four distribution centres, multiple cross dock locations and its 750-piece private trucking fleet.

GPC is strong because of its remanufacturing roots to engineer and source high-quality parts and programmes. The company has and ISO-certified quality system. But until recently, this competitive advantage was being marred by GPC’s disparate technology systems which were preventing it from meeting new expectations in terms of efficiency and visibility of data. The company faced challenges of having multiple systems to manage different parts of the business. Product design, engineering, quality documentation, procurement, production and finance were all separate and it was proving difficult to keep them in sync.

GPC decided to implement Bluestar PLM, with seamless integration as an embedded module into Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM and combinable with3D modelling software (Solidworks) and other Microsoft products such as the Office suite. Following the implementation of the Bluestar PLM solution, GPC is benefiting from a raft of business benefits: better data integrity, new visual aids for the production and quality departments, improved document retention, improved revision history and future revision announcements.

Results

Seamless data flow across the technical department and operations.
Full integration with existing ERP system, Dynamics F&SCM/AX.
One system to assure accuracy and efficiency.
Version management: Immediate access to real-time, accurate data from global departments.
Error reduction.
Increase in production line efficiency.
Reduce IT maintenance.

Errors resulting from our bill of materials have reduced from 60% to below 10%, production line efficiency has increased by 15%. Overall, now that we have access to great detailed information, we have identified many opportunities for improvement. This is guiding some of our key initiatives for the year ahead. We couldn’t have done any of this without Bluestar PLM.

– Joe Stich, Supply Chain Director