AXIOM ERP Helps Wire and Cable Designer and Manufacturer Grow

Profile
Champlain Cable Corporation (Champlain) is the premier designer and manufacturer of high-performance wire and cable for harsh environments. Providing unparalleled service, quality, and engineering support to a variety of industries, including automotive, telecommunications and industrial, Champlain excels at providing solutions for application and processing problems. For tight spaces, temperature extremes, harsh chemicals, flexibility, vibration, or problem connectors, Champlain has the solution. With a strong focus on quality, Champlain’s research team has created many unique irradiated, cross-linked compounds to support numerous challenging applications for its customers.

With a 200,000 square-foot plant in Vermont and a new facility under development in El Paso, Texas, the privately-held Champlain plans to continue expanding its 150-plus employee work force. This continued growth will require that the company maintain flexible and reliable systems to support expanding operational demands.

Challenge
Founded in 1955, Champlain Cable has built a solid reputation as the premier source for wiring cables that maintain unprecedented flexibility in even the harshest environments. Other suppliers might be able to match the resilience of the company’s cables, but none have been able to toughen the cable without reducing its flexibility. Stiff cables typically do not last long when there is movement and stress. As a result, many major automakers, aircraft builders, and other enterprises rely on Champlain to help solve their most demanding cable needs.

Previously part of a large European conglomerate, Champlain became independent in 2003 and had to establish its own support infrastructure, including IT. At the same time, the company saw the need to expand its existing El Paso warehouse into a full manufacturing facility in order to better support its customers’ Mexico assembly operations.

“Our plan was to seamlessly transition products among our operations without any overhead or paper,” said IT Director Alan Clark. “We planned to accomplish this by bringing in real-time scheduling, lineups, dispatch lists, shop travelers, and online operating instructions—all of which are supported by real-time schedule updates to add full visibility to inventory, down to the individual reel.”

Under its parent company, Champlain operated its business using the AXIOM ERP from Boston-based AXIS, a Consona ERP solution. Champlain got by for a long period of time on the original version of AXIOM ERP without using AXIS for support. When Champlain became an independent entity, it chose to migrate to the most current version of the Progress-based AXIOM ERP system and contract with AXIS for support and updates.

Why AXIS?
“We were happy with the original AXIOM ERP solution but we knew that, as our business grew, we would need expanded capabilities and some of the other functionality that is now included in the latest version of the system,” said Clark.

The Champlain team also realized it needed a stronger relationship with AXIS to support an increasingly more sophisticated IT infrastructure. “We are very pleased with the partnership we have with AXIS,” he said. “It’s more than just vendor support and problem fixes.”

Quality control functionality, as well as documentation to satisfy automotive industry customers, were both critical requirements for Champlain’s upgraded system, and AXIOM ERP was up to the challenge. “In the new version of AXIOM ERP, there is a strong quality function that includes attributes and characteristics and certifying to quality standards,” said Clark. “It handles our needs very well.”

Champlain also needed easy access to information. “With the original AXIOM solution, when we needed a report we had to have our programmer write it for us, and that would take a day,” said Clark. “Now, with the current version of AXIOM ERP, we can easily pull the data into a spreadsheet and work with it ourselves. We don’t need that programming resource any more and information is much more readily available to support business decisions.”

Another driver behind Champlain’s upgrade was the system’s ability to support the company’s growth. “We have grown significantly in the last couple years,” said Clark. “The newest version of AXIOM ERP has provided us with significant flexibility and good access to information. Even though we are bigger and multi-plant now, we actually have one less person in IT—yet we’re able to provide better service to the company. To a large extent, this is because AXIOM ERP is an industry-specific solution that provides the tools we need—right out of the box.”

Results
Champlain migrated to its new AXIOM ERP solution at the beginning of last year, initially implementing the same level of functionality as before, but with the new technology and support. The upgrade conversion went smoothly and was essentially completed over one weekend. Significant improvements were immediately evident in data access and implementation of the multi-plant capability.

While this privately-held company was not able to release information on the financial results of this move, Champlain team members did say the system yielded key benefits. According to Clark, a plan is in place to extend use of the system to include many of the new functions. “We haven’t even scratched the surface of the good stuff (wire and cable-specific capabilities) yet,” said Clark.

Champlain will continue its upgrade initiative with a plan for ongoing business process improvements. A long-range plan is now in place to take advantage of the additional functionality that has been added to AXIOM ERP in new releases. Clark noted that by partnering with a vendor like AXIS, out-of-the-box releases of AXIOM ERP will continue to provide Champlain with the robust environment and functional capabilities it needs to support growth and expansion—with only minor modifications.

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