Recreational vehicle manufacturer chooses Glovia to support of lean manufacturing initiatives
El Segundo, CA — July 19, 2004 — Gulf Stream Coach, the industry's largest privately held recreational vehicle manufacturer, said it has selected Glovia's extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, glovia.com, to manage its company-wide operations.
The company said it selected glovia.com to replace a variety of legacy systems, as well as support its lean manufacturing initiatives and make more services available online for dealers and customers.
Gulf Stream Coach produces a full line of recreational vehicles — everything from travel trailers to luxury motor homes — from five manufacturing facilities located in Indiana. The company plans to implement glovia.com at all of its manufacturing facilities, and started at its luxury motor home division located in Nappanee, Ind., in March 2004. The facility is scheduled to go live in October 2004 with the other manufacturing facilities to follow.
Dan Miller, IS director for Gulf Stream Coach, said Glovia's company-wide solution should enable Gulf Stream to streamline processes and manage mission-critical operations from one simple interface. "We also wanted a partner that would work with us to implement the solution in phases instead of the 'big bang' — or all at once approach — many of the other ERP vendors we looked at required," he commented. "Glovia met all our requirements, and we are pleased to have selected a company that will work with us to meet our long-term goals."
Previously, Gulf Stream Coach had been running a variety of customized legacy systems that required excessive time and manual effort to integrate. This made obtaining the information necessary to make important company decisions difficult.
Also, due to the amount of manual entry required, the information was prone to errors. Gulf Stream Coach selected glovia.com to alleviate the manual integration process and provide real-time access to company information so crucial business decisions can be made quickly and with confidence.
Gulf Stream Coach said it has also long been involved in the practices of lean manufacturing, providing training and techniques and laying out the design of their facilities to eliminate waste, improve processes and better serve their customers. However, the information systems the company was employing were unable to support these lean initiatives and actually were beginning to hinder the processes.
With glovia.com, the company has a solution with the ability to streamline operations by providing the information needed to control processes, coordinate enterprise-wide activities, monitor quality and measure improvements as effectively as possible.
Another area of interest to Gulf Stream Coach is using the Internet to improve the services it provides to its network of dealers and end customers. The company said it wants to make it as easy as possible for dealers to do business with them and will begin by moving services such as ordering of parts and registrations to the Web using glovia.com.
Gulf Stream Coach also has plans to extend Web-based services to its customers, including warranty claims online and allowing them to customize and order their recreational vehicles through the Internet.
"We are very excited to have been selected by such a prominent vendor in the recreational vehicle industry," stated Yuji Nakasu, president and CEO for Glovia International. "Our solution has been designed to support the actual ways manufacturers, such as Gulf Stream Coach, produce their products. glovia.com's ability to support Web services and lean manufacturing will allow Gulf Stream Coach to streamline operations, increase overall productivity and improve customer service."
