A leading wire and cable manufacturer for over 25 years, Lake Cable believes in continually finding better, smarter and faster ways to produce high-quality products. By staying on the forefront of innovation, Lake Cable delivers the best products with some of the fastest lead times in the industry.
For years, the wire and cable industry trailed other manufacturing verticals in implementing Industry 4.0 technologies. Indeed, many industry veterans remained skeptical of the ROI for analytics solutions. That’s why becoming one of the first wire and cable companies to embrace analytics represented a risk for Lake Cable. But it was one that would pay off, despite years of industry fluctuations, including today’s climate of increased demand and constraints on labor and raw materials.
We realized that we needed to pinpoint the levers to increase capacity.
Lake Cable started by assessing their opportunities for improvement. They were missing production targets but didn’t know why. With Oden, they were able to immediately activate the lever to increase capacity. The analytics showed that, while the number of downtime incidents was low, the length of downtime was greater than they realized – 10x greater across all their lines collectively. Upon pinpointing the problem, they used Oden to categorize downtime incidents, identify root causes, and build action plans. The data gave everyone – from operators to supervisors and upper management – a common, precise language to quickly align on a strategy.
Learn how you can increase throughput while maintaining quality with Oden.
Lake Cable runs 60,000 products per year. Identifying the factors leading to quality failures was like finding a needle in a haystack. Lake Cable engineers often spent 3 to 5 days per issue to manually inspect production, scrap flawed cables, run redundant production cycles, and test remedies. With Oden’s platform, in just 20 minutes, one engineer could find anomalies in extrusion runs, identify problematic process variables, define the root cause, and calculate production impact. Ultimately, Lake Cable engineers implemented process improvements that increased the first-pass yield by 25%.
Analytics have positively impacted Lake Cable beyond quantitative production improvements. Now they can better serve customers with production insights that provide more accurate delivery timelines. With a more real-time and accurate view of production, they’ve increased accuracy on costing, so they can better understand and manage the business. The numbers say it all:
With Oden, every Lake Cable employee can understand what’s happening in production. These insights drive continuous improvement, enabling Lake Cable to:
About Oden Technologies
Oden is the fastest and least resource intensive way for manufacturers to get the analytics and guided insights their team needs to be problem solvers. Our software unifies siloed machine, production data, and prebuilt machine learning applications to provide real-time insight and context. Teams are enabled to make faster, more proactive decisions, and reduce firefighting. Our customers have deployed in 42 days, and have achieved 5x ROI in 12 months.
