IT.UA - home page

Aside section
BACK TO CASES

Modeling the price of PGA Electric's finished products with CableDesigner and CableCost

Cable and wire, metal production
Modeling the price of PGA Electric's finished products with CableDesigner and CableCost
scale240 employeeskpioptimization of product manufacturing costs by 0.5–2%
ProductR&DProject time8 months
year of briefcase2024geographyRomania
IndustryCable and wire, metal productioncustomerPGA Electric

PGA Electric (Romania) specializes in the integrated manufacturing of cable products, equipment and supporting materials. It supplies a wide range of auxiliary products to more than 3,000 customers. The company’s annual turnover is over 38 million euros. 

To streamline its production processes, PGA Electric has relied on the expertise of the Ukrainian company IT-Enterprise with a view to handling the tasks of calculating and optimizing the cost of Cable & Wire products and semi-finished products. The international CRU forum was chosen as a contracting platform; it is there that the cable and wire industry players share their expertise, expand partnerships, and involve software and technology companies for further cooperation. 

PGA Electric needed a solution that would allow it to model the price of cable and wire products and semi-finished products depending on the variant of the production chain and the material prices while ordering from different suppliers.

The project had the following objectives:

  • cable price modeling;
  • quick formation of the reference information for calculating the cost of finished products and semi-finished products for all manufacturing variants;
  • automatic uploading of the obtained results, i.e. MDM and PDM regulatory data, to the corporate ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This became possible through integration with CableDesigner and CableCost from IT-Enterprise (international brand: Clobbi World).

The digital core of the project was the Ukrainian no-code/low-code platform IT-Enterprise (international brand: Clobbi World).

Project

Using CableDesigner and CableCost allowed PGA Electric to solve the tasks of modeling the standard price of Cable & Wire semi-finished and finished products. Within 8 months, the project was implemented by the IT-Enterprise/Clobbi World team, whose software solutions enabled quick processing of customer requests.

Master Data Management, MDM

At the process level, MDM combined, unified and synchronized master data, thus creating a single digital environment for the PGA Electric R&D team.

MDM covered the development of a classifier structure for finished products, semi-finished products, raw materials, equipment, process containers and commercial containers (drums).

Among the main working directories, there is a price list (for materials and electricity), which is dynamically updated and synchronized with the corporate ERP system. This is the result of integration with PGA Electric's primary accounting system. Customized directories, classifiers and other reference information ensure that CableDesigner and CableCost are used effectively to solve tasks under the project.

Product Data Management, PDM

As a system for storing and managing engineering data, Product Data Management (PDM) has registers of manufacturing operations and routings, material consumption rates, Bills of Material (BOM) and other essential data.

PDM receives updates from CableDesigner calculations, enabling a comparative analysis of available technical information. This is an important condition for manufacturing execution and the calculation of standard production costs.

CableDesigner

CableDesigner is a tool formalizing design and process calculations required for manufacturing Cable & Wire products according to the IEC standards (International Electrotechnical Commission).

With CableDesigner, MDM and PDM are massively updated in terms of resources (semi-finished and finished products), resource parameters, material and semi-finished product consumption rates, standard operating times of the equipment, and cable winding standards (for containers and drums). Further data includes operational standards for electricity consumption, worker time sheets, and BOMs for each variant of semi-finished and finished Cable & Wire products.

CableDesigner software solution optimizes product development processes in terms of:

  • formalized description of routings in the context of resource groups and manufacturing operations;
  • calculation of alternative manufacturing options for the product;
  • design optimization to adjust material consumption;
  • massive replenishment and updating of MDM and PDM.

As a result of CableDesigner implementation, the company received a unified database of product design and manufacturing technology, saving time for further recalculation of existing standards and rapid creation of new product groups.

CableCost

In terms of CableCost implementation, the project proceeded with developing a model for calculating the standard cost of semi-finished and finished products. The input data for standard cost calculation are material consumption rates, product variants based on CableDesigner calculations, and material prices, stored and integrated within MDM with the corporate ERP system.

CableCost allows users to calculate the standard price for different manufacturing variants on a certain date and for different criteria (costing items). The IT-Enterprise team has introduced a process for regular standard cost calculation for all groups of semi-finished and finished products and further data export to an external accounting system.

Additionally, CableCost helps to run a comparative analysis of the standard cost of various manufacturing variants based on their profitability. It is also possible to model changes in material prices while calculating the standard price of products.

Production management: APS and MES

The structured and unified MDM, updated PDM, CableDesigner and CableCost ensured a smooth transition to the next stages: Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) and the Manufacturing Execution System (MES). 

APS and MES add clarity and consistency to the fulfillment of each production order by providing a feasible schedule of manufacturing operations, which involves

  • flexible production scheduling for a certain planning horizon;
  • planning order fulfillment based on clear input parameters, such as required volumes, quality parameters and lead times, etc;
  • work center utilization management;
  • issuance, registration and execution control of work orders.

Economic benefits

0.5-2% metal consumption optimization in manufacturing with the new CableDesigner calculations
18 months project payback thanks to optimized metal consumption (team’s estimate)

Project details

The project has optimized the R&D team’s work and manufacturing processes at PGA Electric, adding value to the company's competitive advantages in the EU market.

Reduced cost and operating expenses digitalization of the product price modeling process reduces operating expenses due to product design optimization
Localization for English and Romanian-speaking users
95% remote implementation most of the time, the implementation project and customer team training were handled remotely
MDM, PDM standardization under IEC standards data management for all product lines follows the European standards, along with the company's standards

PGA Electric supplies products to the Romanian market and now aims to increase its exports to the European market, particularly to Poland, Moldova, Bulgaria and other countries. Therefore, its top growth priorities are flexibility, cost reduction, scaling of production and logistics capacities, and implementation of IT tools.

IT-Enterprise is a Ukrainian market leader with its corporate ERP system for cable and wire companies, including Stalkanat, Odeskabel, and Yuzhcable. Among its international clients are Ducab Group (UAE), Elsewedy Electric (Egypt), and Nexans (France).

Learn more about solutions for Cable & Wire

Get in touch

Receive
our business proposal
Receive
our business proposal
Fill the form