The Wire and Cable industry is experiencing tremendous growth, with reports expecting the market to reach $220.9 billion globally, by 2025. The reasons for this impressive growth are many: advancements in the telecommunications market, turnarounds in electronic equipment shipments, increasing urbanization, and the associated pace of building infrastructure across the world. Add to it the growth in the power distribution sector, the investments in smart grids, the modernization of automotive and non-automotive industries, and the demand for fail-safe wiring and cabling system architectures.
The Challenges of Wire and Cable Companies
As the market grows progressively, the rise in demand for high voltage cables from oil and gas, automotive, telecom, aerospace, and defense industries is expected to provide several new opportunities for the sector – but meeting this demand in an efficient and timely manner is not easy for there are many challenges that Wire and Cable manufacturers and distributors face:
- The industry is primarily a length-based manufacturing and distribution industry where every order must be custom-made to meet customers’ specific cable length requirements.
- Traditional approaches to inventory and supply chain management make it difficult for companies to have visibility into available stock.
- A highly volatile and competitive market means stricter quality requirements that have to be constantly met.
- Insufficient or inaccurate data on customer needs, market fluctuations, and competitive pressures make it difficult for companies to generate accurate forecasts.
- Inefficiencies in the supply chain due to lack of communication between various stakeholders.
Ready to get a more in-depth view of Dynamics 365 for the Wire and Cable industry? Request your personalized demonstration today!
How Wire and Cable Industry-Specific Dynamics ERP can Enable Accurate Demand Planning
The Wire and Cable industry is largely driven by demand and supply and has high standards when it comes to quality, approval, and certification of products. Instead of standard, commercially available ERP solutions that are designed for discrete manufacturing industries, what the industry needs is a system specifically designed for the Wire and Cable industry.
A tailored system can not only help companies with accurate demand planning; it can also help improve product quality while reducing production cost and time. Because such solutions are designed keeping in mind the specific challenges of the industry, they can help companies:
- Improve visibility: Monitor production processes in real-time and get direct insight into current production levels, available stock, and constraints, all down to the level of individual lengths and reels. Get visibility into specific demand, achieve complete traceability of raw materials and shipped product, ensure corresponding production, and inventory, and avoid late deliveries.
- Enhance planning: Capture customer-specific requirements such as length, tolerances, drum types, and others to precisely register customer requests and deliver on expectations. Track production progress by length produced and materials consumed and carry out full length-based master planning to generate orders with accurate lengths.
- Modify quotations: Understand the operating environment and deliver quotations that are accurate, yet competitive. Integrate with Comex and LME to seamlessly handle fluctuations in copper/aluminum prices and accordingly adjust quotations and invoices.
- Optimize inventory: Take accurate, real-time account of residual lengths in stock as well as that of ongoing production orders, procurement orders, and replenishment times. Drive optimization based on product and machine-specific criteria such as wire diameter, conductor cross-section, number of shield wires, insulating material, wire color, thickness of the insulating layer, etc.
- Manage resources: Enable finite and infinite capacity scheduling depending on whether there is resource constraint in meeting customer orders. Effectively manage resources by taking account of customer order dates, length, availability of stock and manufacturing production capabilities.
Improve Delivery Performance
The Wire and Cable industry, like any other manufacturing sector, always looks to improve product quality, reduce inventory, maximize production, and ensure on-time delivery. However, all this is only possible when companies can automatically generate production orders on demand. A Wire and Cable industry-specific ERP system can provide companies with all the capabilities they need to accurately predict demand and execute orders – in a time and cost-efficient manner.
By improving visibility, enhancing planning, modifying quotations, optimizing inventory, and managing resources, a tailored ERP system can help monitor and track every aspect of the distribution lifecycle to improve supply chain efficiency and delivery performance.
The Wire and Cable Industry is continuously evolving. Synoptek plays a major role in making the ERP systems for the Wire and Cable industry to deliver a short, mid and long-term transformation roadmap which accounts for all the technological advancements in the market and also for ever-changing customer behaviors. Why not get in touch with us to explore our Wire and Cable ERP offerings in detail. Drop us an email on marcom@synoptek.com now!
