KSCWC – Tracktive: Project and SR&ED Tracking in ONE Place

KS Centoco Wheel Corp. is a Windsor, ON based global manufacturer of automotive steering wheels for automotive OEM customers in the Americas and Europe. With plants in Canada, USA and Mexico, KS Centoco is a 7/24 manufacturer with in-house research & design, engineering and testing facilities. Their products can be sampled in cars and vans from Audi, Chrysler, VW, and GM. 

With the OEMs requiring their strategic partners to bear the additional burden of R&D and engineering of products, KS Centoco found itself managing a multitude of geographically dispersed projects while needing to coordinate those projects with strategic suppliers, all the while tracking SR&ED eligible activities and disbursements and sub-contracts. 

No longer would a combination of spreadsheets and rudimentary databases be adequate. With the number and scope of projects increasing, the previous system of maintaining spreadsheets, manually consolidating the information in those spreadsheets, and trying to leverage that data in a meaningful way would simply not be in line with the objective of developing an agile, customer responsive organization. 

Tracktive® integrated design enables a rapid rollout (up and running in as little as 2 days) and delivers results day one. Accommodating auto-manufacturing “GATE” methodology for project/program management, Tracktive brings a level of familiarity second to none, and in doing so is deployed rapidly, accelerating the benefits to the organization. 

KS Centoco’s engineering and design program management team carried out a search for an affordable solution that would meet the evolving needs of the automotive industry as well as provide the company with organizationwide, real-time truth. 

This solution had to have: 

• A secure and full multi-user database driven system, with a single data repository. 

• The ability to search onscreen and retrieve information quickly. 

• A simple method to capture time, expenses, & sub-contracts for a project in one place. 

• Integrated SR&ED tracking for all Project activities and sub-contracts and disbursements. 

• Activities and tasks had to have the capability of ex-tensive and “rich” journaling tied to them. From pictures to links to documents. 

• A report generator so that they were not locked into reports as provided by the vendor 

• Lastly, it had to be real-time so that all parties and locations could see the real-time truth  

In deploying Tracktive®, KS Centoco Wheel Corp. has successfully been able to: 

• Consolidate all projects and programs in one place. Thus allowing all constituents with appropriate privilege access to information from any location . 

• Eliminated all duplication of information with built-in document management. 

• Comply with their customers requirements and synchronize their project management with other supplier partners to project fulfillment. 

• Provide the organization with accurate project financial information instantaneously. 

• Each PM now can “self serve” reports directly from Tracktive’s reporting tool, tailored to their needs by themselves, with instant access to Excel for on the fly charting. 

• Create SR&ED submissions in hours as opposed to the previous weeks, as all SR&ED eligible activities, sub-contracts and disbursements are tagged at source in Tracktive. 

• Proactively monitor and manage projects to reduce/eliminate any surprises. 

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