The Business Challenge
Hella KG Hueck & Co. is an automotive components manufacturer that develops and produces lighting, electronics, wiring and signal processing systems, as well as integrated front-end modules. It is also a global supplier of automotive spare parts. In fiscal 2002-2003, the Group reported sales of €3,027 billion. Its 61 manufacturing facilities, production subsidiaries and joint venture companies employ 22,800 people in 18 countries.
Needing to considerably reduce the time they spend on developing and maintaining their workflows, Hella evaluated two separate workflow tools to aid them. Hella chose Axceler PowerFlow™, because it was easier to use, offered them more flexibility, and provided superior performance.
As part of Hella's manufacturing process of new products, an approval process is needed to execute appropriate product changes to adapt to shifting market and quality requirements. Prior to implementing the Axceler Solution, Hella's Change Request process was manual. Change Request forms were physically carried from one person to the next until the last signature was gathered. In addition, essential information for making decisions was stored in numerous repositories throughout the enterprise, making it complicated for users to access this information quickly. This slow decision making process compounded with lost paperwork and general inefficiencies drove up production costs and seriously impacted their business profitability. To reduce inefficiencies in their manual processes, the Notes development team coded a series of custom Domino applications. Once deployed, the developers were overwhelmed with requests to change the process and include more users, and the initial development team members were no longer available to redesign and update the processes.
The Axceler Solution
Axceler's initial solution enabled Hella to quickly automate their Change Request process using PowerFlow. Hella graphically modeled their approval process using PowerFlow's visual workbench, resulting in a rapid implementation without adding code or design elements to their application. In addition, PowerFlow automatically captured a complete history of the process in an audit trail that answered after-the-fact questions and provided a starting point for new products. PowerFlow enabled Hella to involve additional users in the process effortlessly, by automatically managing document level security, ACLs and notifications. Using PowerFlow's built-in analysis, they immediately identified workflow bottlenecks and resolved them by incorporating aging intervals to escalate work and trigger reminders.
In addition to reducing costs with their new system, Hella needed a unified view in their Domino applications of product data residing in external repositories. They tried coding agents to integrate this data, which spawned additional development bottlenecks as more agents were needed and required maintenance.
Hella used Axceler Notrix™ for the second phase of their solution integrating data from their disparate sources, DB2, SQL Server MS Access and MS Excel. This integration provided quick access to pertinent product information and was accomplished without any coding. Combining this relational data into their workflow application was straightforward and simple, as PowerFlow and Notrix are built to work together seamlessly. Again, Hella immediately realized costs savings in their manufacturing process because employees had access to all the data they needed to make informed decisions in a timely manner.
The Result
Hella's automated Change Request workflow has reduced the time to process an engineering change by 70%, enabling
enabling faster production of new products.
Axceler's tools provided Hella with easy to use graphical interfaces that proved to be a successful alternative to coding. Maintenance can be done in a short time frame, since changes are done graphically instead of the normal code-debug-test-recode cycle. Finding Axceler's tools so easy to use, Hella has enabled seven additional applications including one to manage new product ideas.
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