Coastal Automotive

Business Challenges

• Rapidly expanding company had outgrown its point inventory system.
• Inventory traceability was only possible through spreadsheets.
• Jobs were managed manually in spreadsheets that were not easily visible to all teams.
• Compliance audits required too much manual preparation and verbal explanation.

Solution Benefits

• Streamlined inventory counting from two days to less than one day.
• Reduced scrap rate by identifying and correcting the least-efficient production runs.
• Streamlined compliance audits from two days to just hours.
• Increased shop floor productivity and reduced redundant work.

The Coastal Automotive team is on the front lines of automotive safety. Case-in-point: the team supplies to virtually every automaker across North America, and Coastal Automotive is NASCAR’s premier energy management provider. Its IMPAXX™ foam is used to provide stable and consistent impact response in vehicles while lowering development costs and capital investments. And since 2008, the material has been incorporated into NASCAR’s Car of Tomorrow, beating out nearly 200 competing materials. Add to this three GM Supplier of the Year Awards and three GM Supplier Quality Excellence Awards since 2013, along with several other regional designations. But even with this incredible success, Coastal Automotive continues to push toward innovation – not only in what it provides to customers but also in the ways that it manages its business to scale for growth.

For years after its founding in 2006, Rochester Hills, Mich.-based Coastal Automotive kept track of its growing business via spreadsheets. The company then shifted to Fishbowl, an inventory management system, to get a better handle on orders and shipping. When that system became stretched to its limits, Coastal Automotive began looking for a true ERP platform.

“We needed a system that would enable us to not only manage our business processes but also document and control our plant floor,” recalls Linda Paine, Program Manager, Coastal Automotive. “Up until then, our only ‘traceability’ was through spreadsheets. With the way our company was growing, we needed to start doing bills of materials and process routing in a disciplined manner, controlled by a sophisticated software platform.”

Up-front Training Leads to Streamlined Go-live and Quick Increases in Productivity

Coastal Automotive evaluated solutions and determined that Plex would be the best fit for its needs. The company anticipated a smooth implementation process in the cloud—and wasn’t disappointed.

“Our Plex trainer actually came and sat with us in the conference room to walk us through all the different applications,” says Paine. “And if he couldn’t be there live, we’d do it by phone call and record the call so we could go back and refer to the information. He made sure we really understood what we were implementing so that we could get the greatest possible value from it.”

With the help of the Plex CSS implementation team, Coastal Automotive practiced various business processes in Plex on a test database before going live. By the time the company’s implementation was complete and Coastal Automotive was up and running, its 30 full-time employees and many part-time workers felt fully comfortable on the platform.

“Getting an idea of how Plex would work ahead of time was key to the success of our implementation,” Paine confirms. “We were able to do simple things such as print labels and pretend to send shipments, without interfering with our actual production data. Any time we found a hiccup in a process, we could take the time to fix it and know that we weren’t actually keeping a truck waiting.”

Plex made a clear and near immediate impact on Coastal Automotive’s shop floor operations. As soon as the company went live with Plex, machine operators immediately had a much easier time managing and dispatching jobs and tasks.

“Before Plex, we were managing daily jobs in a spreadsheet,” notes Jeff Bender, Materials Manager, Coastal Automotive. “When you’re running three shifts, it can be challenging to communicate the status of all those jobs at one time. There was always the risk of someone duplicating a job that had just been finished. With Plex, we load all jobs centrally and they are visible to each work center, so the next available operator can take the job and everyone else knows to skip it. That has increased our productivity and prevented redundant work.”

“With Plex, we load all jobs centrally and they are visible to each work center, so the next available operator can take the job and everyone else knows to skip it. That has increased our productivity and prevented redundant work.” - JEFF BENDER, MATERIALS MANAGER

A Mobile Workforce Is a Productive Workforce

By deploying Plex, Coastal Automotive has made the leap from spreadsheets directly to mobile devices. The production team records consumption of raw materials and inventory transactions on four Plex workstations that connect wirelessly to the company’s network. The shipping team uses smart scanners that log onto Plex through a mobile app, enabling them to record information by scanning labels.

“We had no trouble getting people excited about Plex because it means they’re not tethered to individual work carts anymore,” Bender remarks. “When you put a wireless smart scanner in their hands, they can be much more mobile and get jobs done more quickly as inventory moves through our facilities.”  

The benefits of a truly mobile ERP system extend beyond the production floor. Coastal Automotive’s staff can monitor processes from home or on the road.

“Other systems I’ve used require you to set up a VPN if you want to log on remotely,” Bender explains. “With Plex, I can sign on with my phone and do anything from anywhere. If I’m at our facility but don’t have my laptop, I can scan a barcode with my phone and see what’s going on with it. And the reporting capabilities within Plex are definitely much stronger than what I’ve seen in other platforms.”