FACTON expands US market presence in cooperation with KPIT

Software Company FACTON today announced that it has entered into a partnership with KPIT (BSE: 532400, NSE: KPIT) an IT consulting and product engineering partner to global automotive & transportation, manufacturing and energy & utilities companies. Their goal is to implement specific measures to support manufacturers in optimizing product costs. Within the scope of their collaboration, the partners are initially focusing on the US market, and particularly on the automotive sector and discrete manufacturing. FACTON produces an eponymous Enterprise Product Costing (EPC) solution, FACTON^®EPC, which enables companies to carry out uniform product costing across the entirety of their operations, sites and departments.

"Interest in IT-assisted product costing optimization has grown dramatically in the US," explains Axel Weese, Managing Director Sales & Marketing of FACTON. "American companies recognize that professional EPC software will harmonize costing processes across the entire enterprise and improve them so that costs can be optimized in a viable way at an early stage. Alongside its German sites, FACTON already has an office in the US city of Detroit, from where it looks after American clients in the automotive industry - OEMs and suppliers alike. "An experienced partner such as KPIT, a company that already helps numerous customers in the US to implement SAP and Oracle, will be able to provide ideal support for the introduction of EPC software, adds Weese.

By offering FACTON's EPC solution, KPIT has immediately enhanced its range of product costing optimization services, which also includes product engineering services, supply chain analyses and benchmarking. "When advising on product cost reduction and optimization as well as the related processes and IT solutions, we notice time and again that different departments and sites tend to work in parallel instead of together with one another, explains Frederic Ramioulle, President of the Automotive & Transportation Industry Business Unit at KPIT. "If colleagues are working on costing with different sets of data, obsolete information or self-invented methods, it can lead to fatal errors. A central tool such as FACTON^®EPC is therefore indispensable, since it is applied at company level and establishes uniform standards. The EPC solution allows manufacturing companies to ensure total costing transparency throughout a product's entire lifecycle. Cost drivers can be identified early on in development and promptly dealt with.

"KPIT is able to draw on many years of experience in implementing ERP solutions as well as extensive expertise in all key cost optimization processes, states Weese. "One particular advantage of our collaboration is the fact that KPIT is ideally positioned to integrate the EPC software into the existing IT landscape and is able to configure it at the same time.FACTON^®EPC can be linked to existing ERP and PLM systems without them requiring any changes. To further their work, the cooperative partners have agreed on a clear structure for their collaboration: KPIT will act as a 'value added' advisor/ consultant, integrating FACTON^®EPC into its clients systems at their premises. Within this process, the consultants and project managers will adapt the EPC solution to the specific costing needs of each company. In addition, KPIT will also be responsible for providing any technical support needed both in the US and in other company locations worldwide.