About Accuride: Accuride Corporation is a leading manufacturer and supplier of wheels and wheel-end components to the global commercial vehicle markets. The company’s products are marketed under its brand names, which include Accuride®, Accuride Wheel End Solutions™, Gunite®, and KIC®. The company’s products are manufactured in North America, Europe, and Asian facilities.

Business Challenges: Most companies have specialized needs not supported by commercial off-the-shelf applications. This need gives rise to what is often known as “long-tail applications” catering to the requirements of a small set of users. At Accuride, many “long-tail applications” used spreadsheets to address departmental and other unique needs. While addressing immediate needs, spreadsheets restricted the ability to collaborate with other users and lost the historical context when making decisions. Accuride sought and chose Workday Extend as a development platform to support building capabilities for all users and to integrate Plex manufacturing with HR and finance systems.

Why did Accuride choose Workday Extend?

Accuride is using Workday for HR and Financial applications and needed a solution to augment what was already done in these systems. Different data sets make managing applications burdensome, and consolidating the data to harness insights takes additional effort. Accuride embarked on a journey to consolidate manufacturing (Plex), HR, and Finance (Workday) applications on one platform, delivering application development efficiencies as a mid-market company with a limited IT department.  Workday Extend was chosen because the low-code platform allowed Accuride to fill in gaps and create applications needed by the line of business using a standard data and security model. Another benefit was the ability of Workday Extend to support building capabilities that integrate easily with the manufacturing systems used at Accuride.

Early applications addressed three core areas of Accuride’s Plex manufacturing operations: the procure-to-pay, plan-to-produce, and order-to-cash processes. With this effort, Accuride reduced the number of manufacturing, HR, and finance applications by more than 90% while reducing the IT resource load by 50%. Workday became the common access point where employees could go and gather information to do their job. On a global basis, a single access point helps manage security.

Latest Solutions being Built on Workday Extend

Meeting an organization’s goals requires tracking metrics that measure and report progress to appropriate stakeholders. Accuride’s latest application is building a global repository of business metrics showing organizational goals mapped to the actual value delivered. This application’s benefit is putting an action log into the system and connecting a business process to manage associated steps. Such an application results in the entire organization working together through a metrics dashboard while acting on specific to-do’s and closing a loop around metrics.

ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is becoming necessary to stakeholders like customers, investors, and partners and is used to evaluate a company’s reputation. Accuride plans to expand the metrics dashboard to become an auditable repository of ESG metrics with Workday Prism as the data warehouse. Exporting ESG results into different solutions allows customers to assess Accuride as a responsible supplier.

Monitoring workplace health and safety practices are necessary to evaluate an organization’s compliance with regulations. Another recent solution built on Workday Extend is a health and safety audit application built with mobile access in mind. Mobile access allows users to record results on their smartphones and for the environmental, health, and safety (EHS) coordinator to review the results and follow up with the appropriate employees.

A security matrix application allows organizations to simplify managing access based on individual roles through a central location.  Accuride uses Workday to automatically map an employee’s position to their security role in granting access, eliminating the manual process done by a help desk. A business process built using Workday Extend can request additional rights and access, further automating exceptions. Furthermore, this automatic approval process becomes a closed-loop auditable system saving weeks in responding to audit requests.

Variations in supplier costs can significantly impact the sales price to customers and profit margins at manufacturing companies.  Accuride uses a supplier cost-tracking repository and measures the impact of shifting costs on a plant. Giving visibility of supplier costs to the sales team is crucial in determining customer price adjustments. Further, having visibility to cost changes over time helps with accurate financial forecasts to meet investor expectations.

Future uses of Workday Extend

Accuride’s business-to-business (B2B) model is based on long-term relationships with suppliers and customers governed by legal contracts. The contracts are stored in Workday, and Accuride’s goal is to automate the process further using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as follows:

Suppliers: With sufficient knowledge of the supplier, Accuride would like to auto-generate the contract using a repository of boilerplates. Based on the country, specific clauses can be inserted into the contract reducing the possibility of errors. There could be translation into specific languages built into the AI and ML model.

Customers: When a contract is received from a customer, Accuride would like AI and ML to read the contract and highlight areas that need further scrutiny. This could address areas that need more negotiation with the customer.

Accuride sees Workday’s AI and ML progress on the Accounts Receivable (AR) and Accounts Payable (AP) modules as contributors to the automation of these mundane tasks.  Accuride recognizes the potential of piggybacking on these innovative solutions for AI and ML-driven automation of adjacent business processes.

What was the business value gained?

At Accuride, the benefits of automation and efficiencies allow a better bottom line for investors. Common architectural principles of Workday Extend enable the Accuride IT department to securely deliver a better user experience. A low-code platform improves developer productivity without needing specialized skills and is well-suited for an IT department with a limited budget.

Summary:

Using Workday Extend, Accuride can leverage a small IT team and a low-code platform to respond to business needs quickly. Accuride continues to expand into new business domains utilizing the platform. In addition, Accuride plans to leverage AI and ML to automate writing legal contracts with suppliers and customers. Thanks to Workday Extend’s comprehensive roadmap for future innovation, Accuride has established a clear direction for its transformation journey.