CUSTOMIZING CARS OUTSIDE IN THE YARD 22 November, 2021 | Written by Mathias Pötter Every car needs some customisation, even after leaving the conveyor belt. Several tasks are performed outside in the factory's yard and must be documented to ensure quality and best customer experience. The missing link between the single car and the ERP system is Asset Agent to make real-time progress visible. THE GOAL: EXCELLENT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Today, customers want an individual car, their car, not just a vehicle. More and more future automobile owners design their car online, selecting from various options like horsepower, engine type, size, colours, external and internal equipment and features. Leather seats, sound station, entertainment system for the kids, rear mirror camera. Modern factories are capable to customise a standard chassis to individual needs & wishes and providing a unique product and customer experience. At the end of a long process, the moment arrives, the individually crafted vehicle leaves the production line and is parked outside the building on a parking lot, together with several other thousand cars waiting to be picked up. A great moment, if you are organised. THE WAY: PROCESS VISIBILITY EVERYWHERE Seen from a process perspective, the parked car is not finished yet. Quality control, tiny adaptations, cleaning, and fuelling are only the most apparent tasks to be done before the handover to the customer or a freight forwarder. Nearly every vehicle runs through a different process of final touches. The conventional approach to organising the process of finalising a car would be by pencil and paper sheet. Every time the car is moved, the new position must be recorded. The same if a task is completed. As production factories use their ERP, all recorded data from the parking lot has to be entered into the system. This is not just time-consuming but also prone to human errors. As nearly every process step in the entire chain needs to be reported, it is difficult to ensure that these bookings are done properly. One of the most important KPI’s for yard management is the annual throughput of cars. Terminal operators invest a high figure to ensure high productivity. Car manufacturing is a very competitive industry with no room for mistakes or wasting time. Stable and lean processes are a prerequisite to improving the throughput KPI, and Asset Agent is the missing link between your customer's happiness and your plant productivity. THE MISSING LINK TO FULL DIGITALISATION: ASSET AGENT Asset Agent provides the visibility to run your operations efficiently. It is an upgrade to your existing planning system as it delivers real-time data of your process in the yard. It answers the question: What was done to which vehicle by whom and when? Real-time documentation is not only valuable to know the current status of a vehicle operation; it will also generate insights to improve productivity further. Process bottlenecks, fewer errors, higher quality, better resource planning are just a few benefits of using Asset Agent in car-customising processes in the yard. Asset Agent uses a multi-functional transponder that is temporarily associated with a specific car and creates automatic real-time entries in your ERP-System. Do you want to learn more about Asset Agent? PREV ARTICLE RELATED ARTICLES 08 June, 2021 HOW RTLS IMPROVES EFFICIENCY IN THE AUTOMOTIVE SECTOR RELATED PRODUCT ASSET AGENT FOR SMART FACTORY CAREERS RESOURCES PRIVACY & LEGAL 2021 © IDENTEC SOLUTIONS AG