Customer Profile

Name of customer: Draka Norsk Kabel
Country: Norway
Customer industry: Off-shore, Telecom, Datacome, Industrial and Energy Cables
Number of employees: 500
Web address: www.draka.com

Our customer

Draka Norsk Kabel is a Norwegian cable manufacturer and is part of the international Draka Holding cable group, with headquarters in The Netherlands. Draka Norsk Kabel offers a broad range of products both locally and internationally for the industrial, electrical utility, oil and gas, and data communications markets. Draka Norsk Kabel is a pioneer in the Norwegian cable market, with an extensive product range that meets the needs of electro contractors, industry and electricity plants.

Business perspective

Draka recognizes that a well-organized design process is vital to achieve the company's business goals. On the one hand it enhances the quality of the existing and new product data and designs at the lowest possible costs. On the other hand it makes the company more responsive to the customer's needs, delivering attractive quotations quicker with personalized information and formats.

Employing skilled design engineers is not sufficient to guarantee that the company can achieve these goals. The knowledge of the design engineers must be captured in a structured way to protect continuity. Furthermore, this knowledge should become easily accessible throughout the company to set it to action.

Draka Norsk Kabel was previously using an in-house developed information system based on an Oracle platform to cater to its cable design and manufacturing requirements. However, in addition to support for these tools being withdrawn, it became clear that implementing a new system could help Draka make significant efficiency gains. The new system could enable standardisation of information delivery across Draka's entire operation.

Commenting on the need for a new solution, Ole-Petter Hobbelstad, information technology manager at Draka, says: "The new solution had to offer immediate access to information on individual items and products, helping us to answer questions about how to produce items, and provide us with information to produce hard copy and web-based catalogues. This helps our customers select the right product to fit their own needs."

Selecting CableBuilder

When it came to selecting the best solution to resolve Draka's key requirements for the cable design solution, there were a number of criteria taken into consideration. Ole-Petter Hobbelstad explains: "Firstly, to ensure a smooth transition for our staff, we wanted to replace our existing, outdated system with a more flexible and open system but one that also had many operational parallels."

The solution should be able to adopt the Draka specific approach rapidly, and use that as a starting point for continuous improvements.

Draka selected CableBuilder, the cable design solution from Cimteq. CableBuilder helps Draka automate aspects of cable design such as looking up values in international standards and performing repetitive calculations. In addition CableBuilder can give sales persons and customers role-based access to the design information. By interfacing with their ERP backend, the solution can automatically generate Bills of Materials and Routes directly from a design. The comprehensive solution helps eliminate delays and errors and helps integrate the processes of sales quotation, design, engineering and manufacturing.

Implementing CableBuilder

The services from Cimteq, including customization, consulting and training were very instrumental in achieving the project goals on budget and on time. Commenting on the timescales for implementation, Arve Fjellner, former project manager at Draka says: "We signed the contract in the Spring, whereupon Cimteq conducted some customisation work on its application to fit our exact requirements - changes that have now been accepted as standard functionality in CableBuilder."

The project team at Draka was positively surprised with the smooth implementation of CableBuilder. Arve Fjellner continues: "The implementation of the solution began in the autumn and after a successful test period and switchover from our existing system, we went live by the end of the year. There was no visible disruption for our staff, resellers or customers. The new system provides a centralized IT infrastructure to link our three plants and divisions in Norway, and is used daily by several users throughout our information analysis and engineering departments."

Benefits

CableBuilder has enabled Draka to store all information in one centralized repository. Changes in materials used and cost savings programs can result in several thousand changes to the production process over the course of a year. As the information stored in the ERP system can be automatically updated when these changes are processed, the information is not only more reliable but time spent inputting information is significantly reduced.

Arve Fjellner continues: "For our oil business customers in particular, we are requested to produce many customized cables. With CableBuilder we are able to respond to customer requests in the shortest possible time. It also helps us create new processes to produce these cables, and can track the changes throughout the enterprise. The cost of new items can be automatically calculated in CableBuilder. Item construction information is then transferred to our ERP backend to support the production process."

"CableBuilder enables Draka to streamline our design and product engineering processes to become more responsive to customer needs. At the same time, the solution saves a great deal of time and money by eliminating mundane and wasteful data keying activities and duplication of data." adds Arve Fjellner.

Future

Ole-Petter Hobbelstad explains: "Part of our long-term strategy is to move into electronic commerce – beyond our traditional sales channels of resellers, direct sales and frame contracts. Publication of product information to privileged customers through the Internet is the major second phase in our plans for the CableBuilder solution, following the successful completion of the first phase of making product information accessible via our intranet."

"After making sure we improve the efficiency of our information and production processes, we can then move on to collecting all product information on one centralized system so information can be extracted automatically for catalogues and to help sales staff produce quotations quicker and easier." concludes Ole-Petter Hobbelstad.