Charter Next Generation (CNG) is a leading provider of specialty films and material science solutions in North America, serving essential markets including food, consumer goods, industrial, and healthcare. Since 1971, CNG has showcased exceptional manufacturing capabilities across 17 U.S. facilities.
Driven by 2,500+ employee owners, CNG helps address a broad range of global challenges, such as food preservation, waste reduction, energy efficiency, wage equity, and climate change, by leveraging cutting-edge innovation and advanced materials. Committed to addressing sustainability, circularity, and a low-carbon future, CNG aims to enhance lives and lead with purpose. As a proud partner of Ownership Works™, CNG empowers employees by giving them a stake in the value they create.
Before:
Post-Merger Complexities and Disconnected Systems
CNG was formed in 2019 through the merger of Charter NEX Films and Next Generation Films, creating a large specialty film producer in the U.S. While the merger unlocked new growth opportunities, it also introduced significant operational complexity. CNG had to integrate two customized ERP systems—each tailored to the original companies—along with numerous legacy systems.
The lack of integration created visibility gaps across the enterprise. For example, returns for products ordered from a Wisconsin plant were routed to Ohio, leaving sales teams without insight into the return status. Disparate, on-premises systems made retrieving information labor-intensive, often taking weeks or months. These delays hindered timely decision-making across operations, procurement, and sales.
As a private equity-backed company with ambitious growth goals, CNG needed to modernize its technology landscape, eliminate data silos, and create a unified, scalable foundation to support its future.
Solution:
Integrating Systems for Data-Driven Decision-Making
CNG partnered with Spaulding Ridge to define and execute a data transformation strategy.
Spaulding Ridge began with a comprehensive assessment of CNG’s tools and business functions, identifying 11 key platforms across ERP, CRM, and PLM systems. We developed a unified data architecture and proposed a roadmap to consolidate and streamline information.
Key steps included:
- Central Data Warehouse: Data from both ERP systems was integrated into a Snowflake data warehouse in a three-tier structure:
- Staging Layer: Captured raw data.
- Intermediate Layer: Applied business logic and transformation rules.
- Marts Layer: Enabled robust reporting and analytics.
This architecture eliminated data discrepancies and enabled traceability back to original source systems, giving teams a 360-degree view of products and inventory.
- Cloud-Based Reporting: We migrated CNG’s reporting infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud, enhancing accessibility and collaboration.
- Enterprise Performance Management (EPM): We implemented OneStream to unify financial consolidation, planning, and reporting. The nine-month implementation streamlined closing processes and provided real-time visibility into CNG’s financial health
I’m really proud of CNG for making this investment. Their forward thinking in building a modern data platform will allow them to scale and adapt quickly for years to come. We centralized their data integration, storage, modeling, and governance—without disrupting operations or increasing headcount.
After:
Enterprise-Wide Visibility and Operational Agility
Within four months, Spaulding Ridge integrated data from 9 source systems and 2 ERPs, totaling more than 6 billion records. CNG transitioned from weekly inventory updates to near real-time refreshes—updating as frequently as every 15 minutes.
With the click of a button, users can now access current records, enabling traceability of orders and returns across systems. Snowflake’s full data lineage and history eliminated the previous six-month viewing limits, significantly accelerating CNG’s decision-making and improving financial forecasting, inventory optimization, and procurement planning.
CNG also created a data governance steering committee and implemented master data management, reinforcing trust in the integrity of insights. Teams across manufacturing, finance, supply chain, R&D, and HR now rely on a single source of truth—delivering faster, more confident decisions without increasing headcount.
Spaulding Ridge’s implementation of Snowflake and OneStream has accelerated our reporting processes and facilitated juxtaposing budget targets next to company performance across multiple systems.
What’s Ahead:
Scaling Smarter with Data-Driven Innovation
CNG and Spaulding Ridge continue to collaborate on next-generation tools to enhance production efficiency and supply chain planning:
- Material Resource Planning (MRP): A tailored MRP solution will provide end-to-end visibility into raw material requirements, inventory levels, and production capacity. This will help align supply and demand more precisely, ensuring resources are in place to meet growth.
These initiatives will further streamline operations, improve agility, and strengthen CNG’s ability to exceed customer expectations.
