PPC blog

The rapid, global spread of COVID-19 has made companies like ours establish and implement pandemic preparedness plans to ensure the safety of our employees, customers and visitors.

We’re following recommendations from the governments where our facilities are located, and carrying out company-wide measures to combat the spread of coronavirus.

In this blog, we’re sharing details of facility modifications and other procedures put in place to address this pandemic and other potential future health and safety concerns.

PPC partners with several colleges across New York State to provide students a hands-on internship experience through our co-op program.

Each year PPC welcomes 10 to 20 students from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Clarkson University, SUNY Polytechnic Institute and more. Our co-op students work across several departments at PPC, including engineering, quality, marketing, and human resources.

Made in America is a rare sight on packaging and labels, but seeing that label doesn’t just instill American pride and tout American jobs for cable and Internet providers.

Working with a company that can provide innovative and custom products with delivery in a matter of days, instead of weeks or months, can save time and improve subscriber satisfaction.

Local facilities prepared for customer requests

If a product needs to be shipped from the other side of the world, it will take much longer to arrive at a service provider’s facility than if it’s shipped from within their own country, possibly from within their own region or state. Installations and repairs can be done much sooner if product is locally available, generating revenue and customer satisfaction. Ideally, providers should source products with shipping as one of the major considerations for purchase.

"Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance…" This quote from Gary Hamel highlights an issue that we hear a lot about and that anyone in a technology economy will always be concerned about: innovation vs. irrelevance. 

The idea of irrelevance keeps people up at night. Where there is competition, the long-term winner is almost always going to be the innovator. That is what the consultants, the technologists, and even the politicians preach. 

So, what are we talking about when it comes to our day-to-day businesses and our daily obstacles and challenges? We are talking about how we work and how we think. These are not simple things to change or to improve; they involve being open, experimenting, and taking risks. When you are trying to get a project out on time and under budget, there is not much time for experimentation and we all work very hard to minimize risk. So, "innovation" for the long-term can sometimes seem like an impossible dream in the short-term.

We've written a lot lately about connectors, fibers, installations, and technical problems in the field. We think we know what we're talking about there – especially when we talk about creating value for you and for your customers. What we haven't talked so much about is how WE create value when making PPC products. Our practices and our thinking are always aligned around one thing - continuously seeking to maximize value for our customers.

To tell you a little about how we go about it, we're going to switch gears here and talk about Lean Enterprise. Many of you are familiar with the concept, but we want to share with you what it means for us and why it makes us competitive.

In our information-driven world, fiber cable is a critical component of today’s high performance networks. Protecting this fiber is crucial, whether it is the last drop of Fiber to the Home (FTTH) broadband networks, within buildings, inside datacenters, in cars or in specialist applications.

However, when it comes to choosing the right fiber cable solution for your deployment it can be difficult. On the page, each one can look the same so, to help network planners and installers, we’ve created a series of videos. These showcase the complete range of solutions available from PPC; they demonstrate what makes our products different and how they assist in bringing down cost and time, while meeting rigorous quality standards.

Given the overwhelming success of British Cycling, both at the Olympics and the Tour de France, businesses have naturally been looking at how such dominance is achieved. Much of the success comes down to the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ philosophy that team principal, Sir Dave Brailsford, has instilled across both Team Sky and the Olympic programme.

Put simply, it means that rather than looking to gain one big advantage in a single area, the team looks at every process and procedure and how each one can be improved, even if by a small amount. And marginal gains stack up – in a sport like track cycling finding 5 seconds in a short race might be difficult. But finding a gain of half a second is much more likely – discover ten of these and you have your 5 seconds.

To ensure that environmental management is comprehensive and effective the international ISO 14001 standard has been created, building on the well-recognised ISO 9001 certification. It audits the environmental management systems and practices of companies to ensure they are robust and minimise risk.

More and more industries rely on the power of optical fibre to transmit ever increasing amounts of information. Whether it is delivering superfast broadband to the premises, linking electronic systems within aircraft, routing data in real time around datacentres or connecting safety and infotainment systems inside cars, protecting this fibre is vital. However it can’t be at the expense of flexibility, weight or ease of installation.

At PPC we’re dedicated to protecting optical fibre. As the inventors and producers of the world-leading range of patented Miniflex™ fibre cables we make hard plastic flexible through our grooved design process, ensuring the highest level of protection.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the major milestones we’ve already reached:

• Manufactured more than 20 million metres (67 million feet) of duct and Miniflex cable, which has been installed around the world. That’s enough to stretch from London to New Zealand (with a little spare). Given our rate of growth we expect to double this amount within the next two years.