Determined to stay at the forefront of technological development
The most important criterion in the choice of ATA Gears’s new ERP system was its technical suitability for the company’s needs. Given the company’s size, ATA Gears’s operating environment is surprisingly challenging for the ERP system as regards the end product, traceability and customization demands to meet customer requirements.
It is important to know which chain a particular item has gone through; all stages from raw material and pairing, from each single heat treatment batch to final delivery. The criteria included the need for 100% customer-based gear tailoring: another important reason why ATA Gears chose IFS CloudTM by the Swedish IFS Ab. In practice, the cooperation was between ATA and Aveso Oy, the Finnish channel partner of IFS.
IFS Cloud was technically right and Aveso came with excellent references
ATA Gears wants to stay at the cutting edge of IT and digital development. That is why another major criterion was the vendor’s resources. “We wanted an enterprise software company big enough with proven ability and the will to continuously develop their product to stay in the lead in the future, too. We must be able to rely on their capability to keep up with the development of artificial intelligence and other major lines of progress in the IT field and that we can access the latest evolution together with the version updates. And we aim to make a version update annually to keep us at forefront from the information technology point of view,” explains Ville Reuna, Director, Supply Chain Management & IT and project leader of ATA Gears’ ERP renovation project.
In today’s world, information security is of paramount importance in all systems and this was taken into consideration and carefully planned in the selection process. ATA Gears use only Western European servers for data storage and security assurance.
Top marks for implementation
“Our manufacturing equipment did not stop for a minute,” Ville Reuna declares. No doubt he is delighted with the execution of the ERP transformation, all the way from the design stage to the deployment. Obviously for a technology company serving customers working in vital industries around the world – and with very tight schedules – no stops in production is a very important measure of success. As important as the reassurance of real-time data and smart decision-making in the future. Aveso’s Project Manager Antti Toukola totally agrees with Ville’s thoughts: “We are very happy about the successful IFS Cloud implementation with our important partner ATA Gears. However demanding the manufacturing processes, we were able to complete the project smoothly in cooperation with ATA’s team of experts. We are proud to have been able to take this digital leap together and ensure that the new system supports our customer’s business in the best possible way. We are impressed with the ability of ATA Gears’ personnel to simultaneously handle a very healthy order book, deliveries to customers and an ERP implementation project. We look forward with great enthusiasm to a continued cooperation and possibilities to further develop the system yet further.”
ERP integration with AI
The development of ERP systems will be great and fast in the future, because artificial intelligence and machine learning will make the systems run more smoothly. ”Of course we are intrigued by the unbounded opportunity to harness those vast amounts of complex and unstructured data for our use through AI integration. The optimistic scenario is that it’s like abundantly flowing data turning into insight-based action,” Ville Reuna points out. ”And in that case, when combined with the new ERP, our ATAbot can not only reduce errors but also shorten information loading time and create more efficient work flows, shifting the focus from monotonous routines to more creative work. We are convinced that it can improve our productivity and overall business performance. But we definitely want to advance carefully here and play safe. And, of course, we will also raise our automation level by other means than AI.”