When Marcos Purty arrived here in 2011 as the chief of General Motors' Indonesian operations, he found a mothballed auto plant. Today, that plant is humming. About 700 people work in the facility, 16 miles east of Jakarta, compared with about 30 just 18 months ago. And next month, GM will start delivering its first Indonesian-built vehicle in years, the Chevrolet Spin.

Challenge: A world leader in aluminum rolling & beverage can recycling contracted our company as they were looking for a planning and scheduling platform that would enable it to run products from either of its two plants, while improving other important KPIs.

Challenge: Due to the volume of concurrent orders, our client, a designer and producer of fashion fabrics was finding it difficult to continue managing its planning and scheduling manually, which had historically been its mode of operating. It needed to implement platform that could offer a solution to the current problem and manage further business growth.

Any company which can boast a 168-year history has to be doing something right, especially when involved in the diversities of providing complex supply chain products.

Automakers like Ford rely on thousands of tier-one suppliers to provide the materials, parts and services to make its final products. Many suppliers serve numerous automakers, and each of those suppliers, in turn, has multiple suppliers. Other industries' supply chains (such as electronics) are intertwined into the automotive supply chain. There are often six to 10 levels of suppliers between an automaker and the source of raw materials that eventually enter the manufacturing process. The breadth, depth and interconnectedness of the automotive supply chain make it especially challenging to effectively manage business and sustainability issues.

Challenge: To remain competitive, our client, a farmer-owned cooperative, sought to bring compliance methods to its members. For traceability, farms had been taping paper labels on palettes, and in some cases, handwriting lot numbers in spiral notebooks. Our client needed modern traceability measures that were easy for farmers to learn and use without slowing them down.

Challenge: Faced with rapid growth, increasing supply chain complexity and rising transportation and distribution costs, this commercial brake manufacturer wanted to increase efficiency and visibility and wring excess costs from its supply chain.

Challenge: A leading auto parts manufacturer in North America was forecasting significant production volume increases for two facilities in Mexico. Inbound shipments to the locations included domestic Mexico and U.S. supplier pickups, border crossings and line-haul to their Mexico facilities. They needed to minimize costs without impacting service levels.

Epicor Software Corp. has incorporated a number of new features into Epicor Vision, its business-management application for automotive aftermarket distributors and jobbers.