Pacific Insight Electronics

Pacific Insight Electronics designs, manufactures and supplies electronic modules and complete system and service solutions for North American transportation industries. Pacific Insight Electronics customers include original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the automotive, commercial vehicle, marine, and off-road markets in addition to prominent aftermarket distribution companies.

Better inventory management

For more than a decade, the Nelson, British Columbia-based Pacific Insight Electronics has used Epicor CMS business software as the backbone of its operations. Before that, Pacific Insight Electronics had relied on spreadsheets to manage inventory.

"Inventory management was becoming a challenge for us," explains Ron Cockburn, Pacific Insight Electronics's continuous improvement leader. "As a manufacturer of electronic assemblies for a growing list of automotive customers, we were having trouble keeping up with all the part numbers and shipments."

Using Epicor CMS cycle counting capabilities, Pacific Insight Electronics has developed a rigorous system for managing inventory accuracy. This level of accuracy allows the company's purchasing team to rely on Epicor CMS MRP-generated purchasing suggestions and vendor EDI capabilities, freeing up more time for supplier negotiations and proactive supply chain management.

Integrated EDI

Furthermore, the EDI functions of Epicor CMS allow Pacific Insight Electronics to receive purchase orders from its customers electronically.

"We're saving a lot of time by using EDI transactions," says Cockburn. "When our customer places an order, the transaction information is automatically passed from their system to our Epicor CMS system. We've eliminated the tasks of manually entering this information and duplicating efforts, so there is also less chance of human error."

And because Epicor CMS maintains and continually expands its library of more than 4,000 EDI mappings, including those for major automotive OEMs, Pacific Insight Electronics is able to support any new EDI requirements from its customers.

Multiplant logistics

In 2007, Pacific Insight Electronics opened a 30,000 square-foot manufacturing plant in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, Mexico to address the growing demands for the production of wire-harness solutions. Pacific Insight Electronics uses Epicor CMS multiplant capabilities to manage production and intra-plant logistics between the Fresnillo plant and the 72,000 square-foot Nelson plant. According to Cockburn, "Using Epicor CMS centralized EDI communications and multiplant logistics capabilities, we are able to provide our customers the level of support that is essential in today's competitive environment."

Valuable data

Although Pacific Insight Electronics creates customer quotations using its own software, that software uses the cost data captured in Epicor CMS. In fact, many of Pacific Insight Electronics' own software creations use data captured by Epicor CMS.

As the continuous improvement leader at Pacific Insight Electronics, Cockburn has created dashboards that draw from the information gathered by Epicor CMS. These dashboards have been an invaluable tool for tracking the progress of Pacific Insight Electronics' continuous improvement program. Cockburn explains that the dashboard shows key metrics, including on-time delivery, inventory levels, and helps manage work orders.

With the dashboard, Pacific Insight Electronics can manage key performance indicators in order to better manage customer deliveries, inventory levels and work order turnaround times.