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For some, taking on the inaugural role of CIO at one of the country’s oldest manufacturing companies might appear daunting. However, when Chuck Scharnagle was given the opportunity with Revere Copper Products, a more than 200-year-old employee-owned copper manufacturing company, he was ready for the challenge.
“I came in and suddenly I’m blowing the place up,” Scharnagle said. “Instead of, ‘Let’s use Scotch tape to make that machine keep working,’ it was, ‘No, we need to replace the machine because we don’t have time to keep working on it.’”
New sheriff in town. One of Scharnagle’s first priorities when joining Revere was revamping the Rome, New York-based manufacturing company’s infrastructure, which he said was largely outdated.
“We had an AS/400 that was probably 14 years old,” he said. “You could literally sit in the room beside it and hear the blade spinning up on it and [you would wonder] is today the day that it’s going to die?”
For Scharnagle—who has had stints at the government of the Mohegan Tribe, Fruit of the Loom, and Black+Decker—those efforts quickly paid off. By the following summer, Revere had all new infrastructure in place and experienced a significant decrease in failures since his arrival.
Scharnagle told IT Brew that he also helped establish a formal help desk system at the manufacturing company, an upgrade from its previous reliance on a sole employee for all of the company’s technical support snags.
“It was one of those types of things where you knew there was a guy down in the basement that would help you with these things and if you could get him, you got him and he would eventually fix things,” Scharnagle said. “Now, we have three people [at] the help desk. We have a ticket system. You can enter an email and it becomes a ticket in the queue to be fixed.”
Onward and upward. With more than two years invested at the company, Scharnagle isn’t pumping the brakes on renovations at Revere just yet. The CIO told IT Brew that he will now begin to focus on improving the “application side of the house” at the manufacturing company.
“What we’re looking at is rolling out a new [manufacturing execution system]...for our operations team,” Scharnagle said. “We’re upgrading that. The system they’re using is 20 years old.”
Other goals for the company included creating a data lake and warehouse, along with reporting capabilities that leverage power business intelligence and AI.
“We’ve checked off quite a few things,” he said. “We have quite a few things still to do…But it’s been good and it’s also nice to see the changes and what the impact is.”