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Kia Motors America is based in Irvine, California, and is dedicated to the strategies of its parent company, Kia Motors Corporation of Seoul, South Korea. The guiding principles are easily stated: "provide high-quality, high-value vehicles at prices well below the competition and back them up with a 10 Year/100,000 Mile Warranty Program and a customer-first policy."

Safety first, from concept to crash test is our motto. Kia Motors is determined that every one of its vehicles should be as safe as possible, and this goal is ensured by a rigorous system of collision tests and simulations. Right up until the finished vehicle reaches the customer, Kia maintains a thorough customer-oriented quality control system, precisely assessing the customers' needs and demands to enhance the production process.

In the past few years Kia Motors America has managed some pretty incredible growth. This is measured in both the number of dealers who sell our vehicles and in the number of owners who are driving them. As a matter of fact, today there are more than one-million Kia vehicles on American roads. Every year more and more people are discovering the value of owning a Kia.

The situation

As the KIA organization grew; it became evident that many of the internal systems that they were running were not interfaced to each other. As a result management data was difficult to come by and management decisions were being impacted by this difficult data retrieval issue. KIA needed to make some changes that would enable scalability, provide some data consistency and meet the following business requirements:

• Bring all financial applications and procurement onto one platform
• Eliminate individual packages handling a variety of accounting and procurement needs
• Review/revise business processes
• Update technology
• Create automatic interfaces with dealer operations for billing and Accounts Receivable

In addition, the users also possessed a number of goals that they were looking to achieve through a technology change:

• Improve and streamline processes across the finance department
• Add efficiencies to every day tasks
• Automate manual processes
• Provide scalable infrastructure for easier growth and future acquisitions

Solution

After a review of alternatives, CBRE elected to migrate their ERP solution from J.D. Edwards World and OneWorld ‘XE’ applications to J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne application suite of products. While both product lines are a part of the Oracle family of products, the EnterpriseOne product line offered CBRE the opportunity to satisfy their business requirements. CBRE adopted a phased approach to their project:

• Phase Determination
• Phase I – Add one division to the OneWorld ‘XE’ environment
• Phase II – Upgrade the OneWorld ‘XE’ environment to EnterpriseOne 8.11
• Phase III – Migrate the World environments to EnterpriseOne 8.11
• Synchronization programs
• Process reviews
• Project plan
• Level of detail
  

In addition to the application suite plans that were a part of the KIA project, it was determined that a substantial upgrade of the iSeries hardware already owned by KIA (and running other applications) was necessary for optimal performance of those applications and the OneWorld ‘XE’ platform being implemented as part of this project.

Benefits / ROI

KIA has been a successful user of the OneWorld software for more than 4 years now. The greatest measurable improvements attained during the implementation were and continue to be:

1. Standardized financial systems and procedures
2. Consolidated financial reporting
3. Improved month-end close
4. Significant productivity gains in financial operations related to dealer accounts receivable
5. Integrated dealer and financial processes
6. Improved controls

Enviroment

1.Oracle (formerly JD Edwards OneWorld) EnterpriseOne ERP, version ‘XE’ running on IBM iSeries, employing IBM DB2 database on a IBM iSeries hardware platform to deploy the application to approximately 50[SC1] users in North America.