Merit Automotive Electronics builds global management solution with Oracle Cloud

Merit Automotive was founded over 70 years ago as a designer and manufacturer of switches for the automotive industry. In 1996, the company was acquired by Delphi and combined with another entity to create a product line named Mechatronics—an interdisciplinary branch of engineering that focuses on the integration of mechanical, electronic, and electrical engineering systems.

In 2016 Delphi sold this product line to China-based Northeast Industries, which realigned Merit Automotive as an independent company, with headquarters in Spain, a research center in Poland, and production facilities in Poland, Mexico, Brazil, and China—following the geographical footprint of the globalization of automakers.

In 2017, Merit Automotive had to redefine itself and acquire IT systems and technology that could unite operations and reporting across the dispersed operational facilities. This had to happen quickly to enable rapid market entry, as the company anticipated global growth potential and needed the technology and enterprise applications that would support growth and scale globally.

The organization’s immediate challenge was finding a replacement for its on-premises ERP system, which could not be deployed at its international facilities. Merit Automotive also wanted to run a lean IT support team to limit its total cost of ownership and not divert efforts from its core function of designing and building automotive systems. It realized it needed a SaaS ERP solution to provide full functionality quickly and get its production environment ramped up in record time.

With its 2017 rebirth as an independent, multinational corporation and its urgent need for a global ERP and other IT systems, Merit Automotive evaluated two major players in the automotive enterprise software space—SAP and Oracle.

The company selected Oracle because it was the only vendor that could satisfy all its needs. Oracle could provide a solid cloud ERP solution and limit the company’s total cost of ownership. Oracle Cloud applications would also help the firm’s IT organization provide fast implementation in a production environment with high performance and availability.

As part of its restructuring, Merit Automotive opened three new factories in addition to its existing facilities. These new factories required an agile IT infrastructure to support the company’s cloud ERP and infrastructure needs. The team determined that Oracle was the only true cloud solution provider with the scalability and elasticity needed to meet the company’s expected global growth. Ultimately, it implemented Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM) as an integrated suite of applications supported by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Merit Automotive implemented Oracle Cloud ERP on time and on budget in approximately 18 months. The deployment was done in three waves, first achieving proof of concept at its Polish facility before deploying the solution across the rest of its operations. The successful implementation resulted in management harmonization, allowing the company to manage all business units from its headquarters in Spain.

The finance team is fully autonomous in financial closings and analytics. Oracle Cloud ERP solved the difficulties generated by working in different time zones. It now enjoys one data model, standard Oracle best practice business processes, and detailed reporting focused on enhancing decision-making capabilities.

Oracle Cloud EPM allows Merit Automotive to model and plan accurately across its finance, human resources, supply chain, and sales functions. This streamlines financial consolidation and close, improves supply chain processes and sales results, and drives overall better decision-making.

The integrated suite of Oracle Cloud SCM modules connects the company’s supply chain and manufacturing processes to provide real-time visibility, enabling Merit Automotive to respond quickly to changing demand, supply, or other market conditions.

Thanks to the unification of processes and information at a global level, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) gave the company the agility it needed to run its global business efficiently from its headquarters.

The automotive electronics systems manufacturer also developed several custom-built applications on top of OCI. These applications, controlled through the OCI Console, allow Merit Automotive to add value to diverse business units by eliminating manual tasks. These application extensions include Merit Smart, which automates and improves the qualiy of non-standard processes, and Merit Integration, which carries massive amounts of data into Oracle Cloud ERP—exponentially minimizing the error rate in the registration and data loading processes.

Merit Automotive also found significant value in the ability for Oracle Cloud applications to integrate with third-party and Optical Character Recognition invoicing applications.