Customers who measure your delivery performance more carefully than you do.
Early accessCubeERP for automotive & vehicle parts
ERP for automotive suppliers and parts distributors - schedules and call-offs, EDI, traceability and delivery performance that is measured.
- Automotive
- UK hosted, implemented on site
- 01234 672 617
Automotive supply brings requirements most sectors do not impose: rolling delivery schedules rather than orders, EDI messaging, specific label formats, PPAP-level traceability and delivery performance measured to the day.
Getting any of it wrong produces chargebacks and, eventually, a supplier review. CubeERP handles schedules and call-offs as first-class records, produces the EDI and labelling each customer requires, and maintains the traceability the sector expects as a by-product of production.
- By horizon
Firm, committed and forecast
- Per customer
Labels and EDI formats
- Internal
OTIF measured before the scorecard
What goes wrong
The recurring problems in automotive
Not every business has all five. Almost every business we speak to has three.
Schedules treated as orders
A rolling schedule with firm, committed and forecast horizons is not an order. Systems that flatten it into orders lose the distinction and plan badly.
EDI handled by one person
Messages are downloaded, interpreted and keyed manually. It works until volumes rise or that person is away, and errors are expensive.
Labelling that triggers chargebacks
Each customer mandates a label format. Getting it wrong produces a chargeback that is usually absorbed rather than fixed at source.
Traceability reconstructed for audit
PPAP and customer audits require genealogy and process records. Assembling them manually is a job that recurs every time.
Delivery performance measured by the customer
The customer’s scorecard is the first anybody hears of a problem, because internal measurement of on-time delivery does not exist.
What we do about it
How CubeERP is set up for automotive
Configuration, not a separate edition. Everything here is in the same product - it is switched on and shaped during implementation.
Schedules and call-offs
Rolling schedules with firm, committed and forecast horizons held as they are received, with changes highlighted rather than silently overwritten.
EDI in and out
Delivery schedules, despatch advices and invoices in the common automotive formats, processed automatically with exceptions raised for a human.
Customer labelling
Customer-specific label formats configured per account and printed at despatch, so the pack that leaves matches what the receiving system expects.
Traceability for audit
Batch and serial genealogy through every operation, with process parameters, inspection results and certificates retained against the build.
Your own delivery scorecard
On-time and in-full measured internally per customer and part, so a problem is visible to you before it is visible to them.
Capacity against schedule
Production scheduled against firm horizons with capacity checked, so a schedule increase is answered with a fact rather than a hope.
In practice
Two situations from this sector
Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations businesses describe before they change anything.
A scorecard nobody saw coming
The situation
A tier 2 supplier learned of a delivery performance problem from the customer’s quarterly scorecard. Internally, on-time delivery was believed to be fine.
What changed
On-time and in-full are now measured internally per customer and part. The gap was found, understood and closed before the next review.
Chargebacks as a monthly cost
The situation
Labels were produced from a template maintained separately from the despatch process. Format errors generated chargebacks that were budgeted for rather than eliminated.
What changed
Labels are generated per customer at despatch from the actual pack contents. Labelling chargebacks stopped.
How it happens
What implementation involves
The same five stages whatever you make. Discovery, training and go-live are done on your site, because most of what the system needs to know is learned in the building.
- 1
Discovery
A structured session mapping how you work now - the systems, the spreadsheets and the bits held together by one person’s memory. We come back with what the platform covers as standard, what needs configuration, and what needs building.
- 2
Configuration
Your sites, warehouses, price lists, approval limits, document templates, workflows and permissions set up to match the business - not a demo tenant with your logo dropped on it.
- 3
Data migration
Customers, suppliers, parts, bills of materials, price lists, open orders and stock balances brought across and reconciled. We migrate, you check the numbers against the old system, and only then do we cut over.
- 4
Training & rollout
Role-based training so the order desk learns the order desk and the warehouse learns the warehouse, with a pilot group first where it makes sense. Documentation and short screen recordings left behind for new starters.
- 5
Ongoing support
UK support from the people who built the platform, with a named contact, agreed response times, and a product roadmap you can influence.
Questions
What this sector asks first
The common automotive message types for schedules, despatch advices and invoices. Where a customer uses a specific variant, it is configured per trading partner rather than developed from scratch.
Yes. Consignment stock at customer sites is tracked separately, consumed on their pull signal, and invoiced accordingly.
It provides the traceability, process records and inspection data that PPAP submissions draw on. It does not produce the submission for you, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Incoming schedules are compared against the previous version and changes highlighted by horizon, so a planner sees what moved rather than re-reading the whole schedule.
Yes. Multi-warehouse stock, trade pricing, fast order entry and carrier integration cover aftermarket distribution as well as OEM supply.
Where to start
The parts that usually matter most here
Order Management Software
Take, allocate, fulfil and invoice orders from one screen - with live stock, part-shipments, back orders and contract pricing handled automatically.
Read moreManufacturing Software
Bills of materials, works orders, routings, shop-floor booking and real job costing - for businesses that make things to order.
Read moreBarcode & Traceability Software
Batch and serial traceability from goods-in to despatch, with certificates attached and a recall answered in minutes.
Read moreWholesale & Distribution Software
Trade pricing, multi-warehouse stock, fast order entry, pick-pack-despatch and carrier integration for wholesalers and distributors.
Read more
Related
Sectors with similar problems
- Engineering & FabricationERP for subcontract machinists, fabricators and engineering firms working to drawing, to order and to a promised date.
- Electronics & Electrical AssemblyERP for electronics manufacturers and EMS providers - deep BOMs, component shortages, serial traceability and test records.
- Plastics & Rubber MouldingERP for moulders and extruders - tooling, cycle times, cavity counts, regrind and machine data from the shop floor.
If your process really is unusual
Some requirements are specific to one business rather than one sector. Those get built against the same documented API everybody else uses - not bolted on to the side of a database nobody is allowed to look at.
Automotive
Show us a real job from your automotive operation
Bring one order that went wrong and the paperwork that went with it. That tells us more about whether this fits than any list of features.