AUTOKINITON

The Challenge:

EF-3 TORNADO HALTS OPERATIONS AT TENNESSEE SITE AND THREATENS SUPPLY CHAIN DISRUPTION

Autokiniton’s Eastgate Plant in Middle Tennessee suffered a direct hit from an EF-3 tornado on the night of March 2, 2020 and into the following morning. The natural disaster destroyed the facility’s IT infrastructure and resulted in widespread damage that halted operations. Autokiniton’s facility in Lebanon, Tennessee, also sustained damage. 

“You never think that you're going to be in a building that gets hit by a tornado,” explains Darian Lowe, Logistics Operations Manager at Haggerty Logistics. Lowe was the Eastgate Plant’s Materials Manager at the time. “We just saw carnage everywhere around us. It was raining inside the facility.”

Employee safety was Autokiniton’s first concern in the aftermath of the tornado, says Michael Butler, former Eastgate Plant Manager who now serves as Plant Manager of Autokiniton’s Axis Engineering division. Autokiniton had a disaster recovery plan in place and Butler estimates it saved 70 lives that day. 

The next concern was how quickly the company could resume operations at the facility and ensure products were delivered on time to its major automotive customers. The Eastgate Plant had about three days’ worth of supplies on-site when the tornado struck and needed to figure out how to get the materials to the customer and resume operations as fast as possible. 

“Our Eastgate facility was a direct pipeline to our customer,” and suddenly the site’s IT infrastructure was completely gone, notes Butler. The facility also experienced a power outage and a total loss of connectivity. 

The team brought in a backup generator and got to work restoring power. Every department had a different responsibility under Autokiniton’s disaster recovery plan and had to work together to identify workarounds to get its products out of the building and into the hands of customers.

The Solution:

AUTOKINITON TURNS TO DATA STORED IN THE QAD CLOUD TO UTILIZE ANOTHER FACILITY FOR SHIPPING

Autokiniton’s Lebanon facility seven miles down the road lost power and one carrier, but experienced significantly less damage than the Eastgate Plant. The Eastgate team connected to the Tech Center at its headquarters in New Boston, Michigan, via VPN and began developing a plan to use the Lebanon site’s remaining carrier.

“As soon as power was restored at Lebanon, we were able to ship and do all of our normal QAD Cloud business processes out of Lebanon,” notes Amstutz. “They would print product labels for Eastgate, do shipping paperwork and send ASNs. It's really that teamwork from one facility to another that allowed us to do that.”

The team at the Eastgate Plant was able to interact with the QAD Cloud once power and connectivity were partially restored and things began to turn around immediately. 

“Once we got connectivity back, we were back up and running in record time” because everything was stored in the QAD Cloud, explains Lowe. 

“We had five separate 4G connections through the VPN to the QAD Cloud so that we could keep our shipping and our operations up and running,” continues Amstutz. 

“QAD Cloud ERP allowed us to begin using the systems much more quickly than we would've been able to if we had not had it,” adds Lowe.

The Benefits:

QAD CLOUD HELPS AUTOKINITON’S EASTGATE PLANT RESTORE OPERATIONS IN 36 HOURS

“The QAD Cloud is everything for us to the fact that it's literally not on-site,” explains Butler. “If there is a disaster, you still have your data sitting in the cloud and it's always there.”

“That helps with your connectivity once you bring it back up because your data's never lost,” continues Butler. “You have access to it no matter where you are. No matter when the disaster hits, you can still get to the cloud and your data. That’s key.”

“QAD is the pipeline for communication” at Autokiniton, notes Butler. Restoring manufacturing operations alone wouldn’t have been enough for the Eastgate Plant. It uses the QAD Cloud to communicate internally, as well as to customers, and having the solution in place made the recovery process much more seamless.

“One of the big benefits of QAD is not only is it a comprehensive ERP solution, but it's a comprehensive ERP solution that is relatively easy to implement and that allows us to be agile,” explains Amstutz. 

“We originally chose QAD in 1996 and, at that time, we were running a basic business system. QAD was specific to the automotive manufacturing vertical market. They had the functionality that we needed,” continues Amstutz. QAD also had functionality Autokiniton didn’t need at the time, but would in the future.

“QAD is looking forward and saying, ‘Hey, we see where the automotive industry is going and we're going to develop that functionality because we know this is what they're going to need.’”

QAD Cloud ERP helped Autokiniton bring the Eastgate Plant back online, but it also makes it easier for the organization to start production at other facilities as it opens or acquires them. 

“We have the ability to bring connectivity to that facility, load in items, bill material and routing and start shipping with a software product like QAD Cloud ERP. Being agile and being able to move at the speed of business, that's effectiveness,” explains Amstutz. 

“If I had any advice for another company like Autokiniton when it comes to disaster recovery, I would say, if your data's not in the cloud today, please put it in the cloud,” adds Butler. “I firmly believe that if we did not have that access, we would've still been down way longer than we were.”

“Because we have access to the QAD Cloud, it changed everything. It was literally a game changer,” concludes Butler.