Skip to content
1961 Digital TransformX
العربية

Industry

You sold at last month's copper and paid this month's

Cable is a commodity conversion business wearing a manufacturing coat. The margin is decided by the copper price on the day the order is confirmed and by the yield you lose across drawing, stranding and extrusion. Most plants measure neither in time to act.

Book a consultationAll industries

What the day actually looks like

  • A tender was priced on a copper figure from the LME six weeks ago, and the buyer is still deciding whether to place it.

  • The drum in bay four says nine hundred metres on the tag. Nobody has confirmed that since the last cut.

  • A customer orders 3x185 in cut lengths of 47, 63 and 112 metres, and the plant must decide which drum to break.

  • The armouring line ran short on galvanised wire, so the order jumped a queue and two other drums sat part-finished.

  • The consultant asks for routine test certificates against the exact drum numbers delivered, and the file has the batch, not the drums.

Where it usually breaks

  1. A quote with no metal clock

    The price was built on a copper rate, a conductor weight and a conversion margin, then sent out as one figure with a validity nobody enforces. Metal moves, the order lands eight weeks later, and the difference comes out of the conversion margin — which was the only part of the price you actually earned.

  2. Stock in kilograms, orders in metres

    Purchasing thinks in tonnes of copper rod and drums of compound. Sales sells metres. Production converts between them with a factor in somebody's head. When the two units are not reconciled by the system, the metres you promised and the kilograms you own stop agreeing, and neither figure can be trusted for planning.

  3. Yield lost between stages

    Rod goes to drawing, wire goes to bunching and stranding, cores go to extrusion, then laying up and armouring. Each stage has scrap, start-up waste and length lost at the joint. If yield is only measured from rod purchased to cable sold, you know the total loss and nothing about which line causes it.

  4. The drum is not a stock item

    Systems hold a product and a quantity. The plant holds drums, each with its own remaining length, its own test results and its own physical location in the yard. Without drum-level identity, cut-to-length allocation is done by a supervisor walking the yard, and short ends accumulate as stock that is technically available and practically unsellable.

  5. Certificates disconnected from delivery

    Routine tests are performed and filed by production run. Type test reports live with quality. The delivery note lists drums. When a consultant demands the certificate matching the drum on his site, the link is made by hand from three sources, and the shipment waits at the gate while it happens.

How the work runs

  1. Price the metal separately

    We split every quotation into a metal component and a conversion component, each with its own validity and its own basis date. The metal element can be repriced on confirmation or hedged against a fixed purchase, and either way the conversion margin you actually manage becomes visible instead of being the shock absorber.

  2. Drums as tracked objects

    Every drum carries an identity, a remaining length, a stage, a location and its test results. Cutting, rewinding and returning short ends are real transactions. Allocation for a cut-to-length order proposes the drums that leave the least unusable remainder, and the yard stops being searched on foot.

  3. Yield measured per stage

    Drawing, bunching, stranding, insulation, laying up, armouring and sheathing each report input and output in their own units. Scrap is booked with a cause at the line that made it. A die wearing out or a compound batch behaving badly shows up as a yield step change rather than as an annual variance.

  4. Certificates bound to drums

    Routine test results — conductor resistance, insulation resistance, voltage test, dimensional checks — are recorded against the drum, not the run. The type test report for the design attaches to the product. The delivery pack then assembles itself from the drums on the note, and the truck does not wait.

  5. Plan the constrained line

    Extrusion and armouring are usually the bottleneck, not the drawing machines. We schedule against the constraint with compound changeover and colour sequence modelled, so an urgent insertion shows what it displaces before the supervisor makes the call rather than after two drums are stranded part-finished.

What changes once it holds

  • The metal exposure on an open quotation is visible before it is accepted.
  • Metres promised and kilograms held reconcile without a manual factor.
  • Yield loss is attributed to the stage that caused it.
  • A drum can be located, measured and allocated from a screen.
  • Test certificates ship with the drums they belong to.
  • Short ends are visible as recoverable length, not dead stock.

Two businesses in one factory

A cable plant runs two businesses at once and usually reports them as one. The first is metal trading: you buy copper or aluminium, hold it for a period, and sell it embedded in a product. The second is conversion: you turn that metal into an insulated, armoured, tested cable and charge for the work. Blending them into a single margin figure hides both. A good month for the conversion business looks bad because metal fell; a badly run plant looks profitable because metal rose. Split the two in the costing and in the reporting, and the operations team is finally measured on the part it controls.

The drum is the unit that matters

Nothing in this trade is delivered as a quantity of product. It is delivered as drums, each with a number, a length, a test record and a customer expectation attached. A system that models only product and quantity therefore describes a factory that does not exist, and every gap it leaves is closed by a supervisor with a tape measure. Modelling the drum as the physical object it is fixes several problems at once: cut-to-length allocation, certificate matching, yard location, and the slow accumulation of short lengths that no order will ever quite fit. Those short ends are usually a real sum of money sitting in a corner of the yard.

What an inspector is actually going to ask

A consultant or a utility inspector does not ask whether you have a quality system. He asks for the routine test results for drum number 4471 delivered to a particular substation, and the type test report for that exact construction from an accredited laboratory, and he asks while the cable is on a truck at a gate. Everything upstream of that moment is preparation for it. If the tests are captured at the line against the drum, and the type test report is attached to the design rather than to a folder, the answer takes a minute. If they are not, it takes two days and the site loses a shift, which the site will remember at the next tender.

Questions we get asked

How do you handle copper price changes on open quotations?
By separating the metal from the conversion at the point the quotation is built, and holding a basis date and a metal rate on the record. Open quotations can then be revalued against the current rate in one view, so you can see the exposure before the customer accepts. What you do about it is a commercial decision, but you make it with a figure in front of you.
Can the system handle cut-to-length and rewinding?
Yes, and it should drive them. A cut proposal considers the drum lengths available, the customer tolerance and the remainder each option leaves. Rewinding is a production transaction that creates new drum identities from an old one, carrying the test results forward. Short ends stay visible as usable length with their own valuation rather than disappearing into a general stock figure.
Do we have to weigh every drum?
No, but you should weigh the ones the system is unsure about. Length is derived from the line counters and confirmed by weight at the stages where drift is known to occur. We set the tolerance with your team, and the system asks for a weight only when the derived figure and the expected figure disagree by more than that. Constant weighing is how a control gets abandoned.
We export to several markets with different standards.
Then the standard belongs on the product design, along with the type test reports valid for it and the marking requirements it imposes. An order for a market is checked against the design's approvals before it is confirmed, which is a great deal cheaper than discovering at the port that the sheath marking is wrong for the destination. The check is a rule in the system, not a memory in the sales office.
Is Odoo capable of this, or do we need something heavier?
For most plants in this region, a properly implemented Odoo manufacturing configuration with drum-level lot tracking and a small amount of purpose-written code covers it. For very high-volume continuous operations it may not, and we will say so. That judgement goes in the written diagnosis with the reasoning, because we do not earn a licence commission either way.

What this industry usually needs

Tell us what is not working

Send one line about what is going wrong. On the first call we will tell you whether it is a system problem, a process problem or a governance problem — and which one to fix first. That call is free and it is not a sales meeting.

Book a consultation