A customer rang the Delhi office one afternoon to ask when his drum of 4-core armoured cable would leave the plant. Getting him an answer took two days.
Nobody was being slow about it. The order sat in one spreadsheet, the copper drawn against it in a second, the extrusion line's daily output in a third, and the drum itself was somewhere in the finished goods yard at Khushkhera with a chalk mark on the flange. Four people each held a piece of the answer. None of them held all of it.
BMI Cables has been making wire and cable since 1998. The Bhiwadi plant runs the whole chain in-house, from wire drawing through to packing, across PVC, XLPE, rubber and silicone insulated products for customers in oil and gas, power, railways and telecom. It's ISO 9001:2015 certified and its lab runs routine, acceptance and type tests against IS, IEC and BS standards. Until 2025, all of it was coordinated in Excel.
How does a cable manufacturer move off spreadsheets without stopping production?
Why cable manufacturing breeds spreadsheets
A cable is a stack of decisions before it's a product. Copper or aluminium. Conductor size, anywhere from half a square millimetre to six hundred. Number of cores. Insulation type. Armoured or unarmoured. Sheath material. Voltage grade. Colour coding. Whichever standard the customer's specification calls out.
Multiply those out and BMI's catalogue runs to thousands of live variants, most of them made to order rather than to stock.
Every one of those decisions used to live in a sheet. A costing sheet per product family, because the bill of materials shifted with every combination. A sheet per major customer order. A drum register. A daily wire drawing output sheet. A copper rod consumption and scrap sheet kept shift by shift. A test certificate register. A dispatch and e-way bill tracker. A goods receipt register. A vendor rate comparison. Machine-wise downtime. Contractor labour attendance.
When the team sat down and counted, more than 150 files were in regular use.
Nobody had set out to build 150 spreadsheets. Each one solved a real problem on the day it was created, and none of them knew about each other. It's how plenty of plants end up running production in Excel while the books sit in Tally, with nothing joining the two.
The copper problem
Pricing was where this hurt most.
Copper moves daily. A costing sheet built on Monday's rate is wrong by Thursday, and when conductor is most of your material cost, it's wrong by enough to matter. The sales team quoted off whichever version of the costing sheet they had, and which version they had depended on who'd emailed it to them and when.
Some quotations went out carrying a rate three weeks old. Those orders were won. The margin on them wasn't.
The current copper rate existed in six places and agreed with itself in none of them.
Nine days of archaeology
The other cost was time. Closing the books each month meant one person pulling figures out of a dozen files, chasing the two people who hadn't updated theirs, and reconciling what production said it had made against what stores said it had received.
Month-end close took nine days. For nine days a month the finance team did archaeology instead of accounting, and by the time the numbers were clean they described a month that had already finished.
How the rollout ran
Facto went live at Khushkhera over six to seven months. Our own engineers ran the deployment, on site and remotely, which is the practical case for skipping the third-party implementation partner on a single-site plant.
The sequence mattered as much as the software. Twelve modules did not come on at once. Production and inventory went first, because that's where the missing information was. Purchase and quality followed. Costing and invoicing came last, once the underlying data was worth trusting.
Three things changed on the floor.
Order status became a lookup. Every work order carries its own live status now, from drawing through insulation, armouring, sheathing and testing to the drum in the yard. The Delhi office answers the customer without calling the plant.
Costing updates once, everywhere. The copper rate goes in one place, and every quotation raised after that carries it. The sales team stopped quoting from memory.
Test certificates sit with their batches. QC data that used to live in its own register now hangs off the batch it belongs to, which matters when an oil and gas customer asks for traceability twelve months later.
Where things stand
Copper scrap on the drawing lines fell from 3.6% to 2.4% across the first two quarters. Most of that came from the daily variance landing in front of the shift supervisor on the same shift, rather than in front of the accountant a month later.
Quotations that used to take three days go out the same day, because nobody is hunting for the current version of a costing sheet. And the 150 spreadsheets are down to a handful that still do things worth doing outside the system, which is a more honest outcome than claiming they all vanished.
We wanted real-time visibility on production and QC. Facto gave us a system our teams could actually use on the floor without complexity.Kumar Goyal, Managing Director, BMI Cables
What we'd tell another cable manufacturer
Two things, from having done this one.
Start with production and inventory, and leave accounts until later. The pull is to begin where the reporting pain is loudest, which is nearly always finance. Finance sits downstream of everything else. If the shop floor data is wrong, a faster close just gets you to the wrong number sooner.
And expect the spreadsheets to fight back. For the first month several people kept running their old sheet in parallel because they didn't trust the system yet. That's reasonable behaviour and it isn't worth arguing with. It stops on its own, usually around the time somebody notices they haven't opened the file in a week.
BMI Cables Private Limited manufactures elastomeric, PVC and XLPE power and control cables, welding cables and enamelled winding wires at Khushkhera, Bhiwadi, with commercial offices in New Delhi. It's a group company of the ESS ELL Cable Group.
If your plant is running on spreadsheets that don't talk to each other, book a 30-minute walkthrough on a live instance configured for cable and wire manufacturing.