Success story
Great Dane streamlines order lifecycle management with Flowable
Challenge – agility in enterprise resource planning
With a history dating back to 1900, Great Dane has established itself as a transportation solutions leader within the field of durable and high-quality trailers and truck bodies.
With a supply chain that includes thousands of individual components, Great Dane must manage a great deal of complexity to successfully deliver thousands of finished truck trailers and truck bodies each month. The respective processes with dealers and suppliers lay both inside and outside the company’s JD Edwards ERP system, involving manual, time-consuming tasks. With an ongoing transformation towards lean manufacturing, Great Dane needed a solution to better control their services, orchestrate business processes end to end and increase agility in development. With these criteria in mind, Great Dane turned to Flowable: The platform combines business process management and case management, therefore offering a great level of flexibility from process to system. Due to the platform’s low-code, rule-based approach, Great Dane can customize it to meet their needs out of the box. The system allows the company to add different layers of processes at any time without risking breaks to the existing system.
Increasing transparency in supply chain management
Great Dane has customized Flowable’s solution into an application called Supplier LEAN Alert. Based on Flowable’s business process and case management solution, Supplier LEAN Alert is designed to create a structured and highly automated method of raising parts issues with suppliers. The solution adds transparency and stability to the process, as employees at Great Dane are able to track it across the entire lifecycle of any work order.
This was an example where you can really see the power of Flowable in action. We started looking at the scope of work in December and the application went into live production by early March.”
Joey Dyer, Director Enterprise Architecture Great Dane
The Supplier LEAN Alert system built in Flowable has helped reduce complexity to ensure that any component or supplier-related issues are dealt with faster and with less chance of human error.
The ideal solution to match a digital vision
Besides the solution’s success regarding the current improvements, it also had a major impact on Great Dane’s strategic thinking for the future, leading to the vision to expand the system further. The new internal LEAN alert will cover not just suppliers but anything happening on the shop floor, with a machine, process, or order, and anything else that can lead to delay.
This shows that Flowable is greatly accelerating Great Dane’s development processes. Development on the new system using Flowable is progressing rapidly. This is why Joey Dyer points to the flexibility and simplicity of the Flowable platform as a key enabler in Great Dane’s digitization:
We invest in innovation that runs from the shop floor to the digital systems used in the back office. With Flowable, we have a way to turn our ideas into useable software that provides real value in a more efficient way and matches the company vision.”
Joey Dyer, Director Enterprise Architecture Great Dane
