SYSPRO ERP Delivers Huge Gains to Fiber-Optic Cable Client

COSTA MESA, Calif.--SYSPRO, a provider of visionary ERP for the manufacturing pragmatist, has today announced that its customer, Optical Cable Corporation, a leading manufacturer of fiber optic cables for the enterprise market, credits its SYSPRO technology deployment with contributing to the company’s recent operational success and improved profitability. The $45 million cable manufacturer, based in Roanoke, Virginia, says it has improved gross profit by 31.2% and has recently won the 2008 Exporter of the Year Award in Information Technology and Telecommunications from Commercial News USA, the official export promotion magazine of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Since deploying 37 SYSPRO modules in 2004, Optical Cable executives say they are well positioned to grow sales, increase gross profit, and capitalize on major new business opportunities:

• Multi-million-dollar contracts with the U.S. military;
• Deployments in the automobile racing industry and with professional football broadcasting networks;
• Gross profit margin improvements from 32.1% to 42.1% during the period of Q1 2007 to Q1 2008;
• Non-U.S. sales spiked 22.7% in fiscal year 2007;
• 2008 Exporter of the Year Award in Information Technology and Telecommunications from Commercial News USA, the official export promotion magazine of the U.S. Department of Commerce;
• START-IT Magazine’s 2007 Mid-Market Manufacturer of the Year Award.

Noting that the company recently enjoyed its largest quarter in net sales (Q4 2007) since the crash of the fiber optic market in the summer of 2001, Optical Cable Corporation’s President and CEO Neil Wilkin states, “Our ability to grow and our improved margins are due to investments made to significantly upgrade OCC’s facilities, processes and systems, in great part made possible by our new SYSPRO ERP system. SYSPRO has delivered efficiencies by improving production flow and visibility, enabling us to make better business decisions.”

Adds Optical Cable CIO John Ferguson, “While Optical Cable is a smaller company revenue-wise, the company has the same headaches as bigger organizations, and we’re even publicly held so that adds the financial compliance wrinkle,” he said. “But being smaller, we can’t afford inefficiencies – particularly when our top line can be challenged by industry factors outside of our control--factors like the telecommunications industry fallout in 2001. Optical Cable didn’t have optimized business processes or SYSPRO then...and it hurt. We didn’t have the processes or technology to deploy new operational efficiencies easily.”

Ferguson noted that often the best ideas and the best products don’t always make it in the global market because they might lack the right business model, processes or technology partners. “SYSPRO enables us to more easily do things for customers that our competitors can’t do as well, such as build products to customer specifications.”

Ferguson adds, “The SYSPRO e.net platform helps us tailor the system to our requirements without the headaches of modifying source code. In fact, we expect this flexibility to assist us in scaling our systems to support future growth, such as our acquisition on May 30, 2008 of SMP Data Communications, a leading supplier of fiber optic and copper connectivity products for the data communications industry.”

Optical Cable also utilizes a highly sophisticated scanning system for location tracking and transaction entry, replacing labor-intensive record keeping, and, at the same time, providing managers with real-time job and inventory tracking data to facilitate accurate decision-making. Workers use handheld and base scanners to track inventory from the time raw materials are received through all phases of manufacturing and distribution. The scanners also utilize SYSPRO e.net components to process data to the SYSPRO ERP system in real-time.

SYSPRO’s more thoughtful approach to adopting new technology, such as web services and SOA platforms, also reflects the desires of its buyers who are driven by business needs and not by the latest headlines. This exemplifies SYSPRO’s ongoing strategy of helping to simplify the success of its customers. SYSPRO calls its buyer landscape “PragmaVision,” ™ consisting of pragmatic, visionary ERP executives that are driven by a desire for smart, but aggressive market growth.

About SYSPRO

Since its inception in 1978, SYSPRO has been delivering state-of-the-art business solutions to some of the world's leading companies. As a global leader in the production of world-class ERP software, the company now caters to the specialized needs of 14,000 licensed companies in more than 60 countries worldwide. SYSPRO is marketed globally through regional territory distribution centers and a global reseller network in the US, Canada, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia and the UK.

SYSPRO is a fully integrated business software solution that provides complete control over the planning and management of all facets of business including accounting, manufacturing and distribution operations in a variety of industries.