Today, Steelwedge is sharing the success story of our customer, Contech Engineered Solutions of West Chester, Ohio, an engineering and construction company that has transformed the way they do business thanks to a new S&OP process.
Over the past 100 
years, Contech has grown into a diversified civil engineering site solutions company that provides bridge, drainage, erosion control, retaining wall, sanitary, soil stabilization and storm water solutions on a national scale. These solutions power national infrastructure systems like interstate highway and bridges but, recently, due to a slow economy and the unpredictable price of raw materials like steel and aluminum Contech faced a turning point.
“Volatility is part of doing business,” says Randy Ramsey, Director of Supply Chain at Contech. “But we needed to improve our planning processes so that we could better react to anything that came our way, from good news–like an unexpected, large order—to challenges, like materials shortages.”
The S&OP journey
That’s when Contech moved to improve their supply chain management processes. Upon close inspection of these processes, they realized that a successful history of acquisitions had resulted in escalated growth and a world class team but also extended complexity with multiple processes and systems. Without a centralized team approach and consistency throughout the organization, the business was not optimizing to its full potential and was getting by without a tight view on the critical raw materials needed to run an efficient business.
In order to continue to go after market share opportunities while optimizing working capital Contech created a supply chain organization to cross over all its functional areas and optimize its core assets. For Contech and Ramsey, the driving goal of supply chain and S&OP was year over year improvement, beating the market and achieving strategies to drive customer satisfaction.
The company first pulled their functional areas together to ensure collaboration and put a strong emphasis on people, process and technology, early while focusing on sales and operations planning (S&OP). Next, by implementing the Steelwedge platform, the company got a centralized view of the demand plan powered by a mix of management forecast, statistical forecast, historical data, and future quotes.
To read the full story of Contech’s S&OP success and their 40% increase in return on capital, download the case study.
