A legacy cable-manufacturing ERP goes global with a new face
2024–2026
End-to-end work bringing a deeply specialized, decade-old cable-manufacturing system Cadet ERP into the present — from product UX/UI to brand, website, and sales materials — for an international launch at the Wire Düsseldorf 2026 expo.
Intro
The system was deep, but the first impression wasn't.
Cadet is a Czech ERP built exclusively for cable manufacturing. For over a decade it had quietly run the production floors of the largest Czech plants — from construction to dispatch — at companies that depended on it daily. By the time we joined it worked well, and its users trusted it.
The brief was to take it international. The real question was this: how do you bring a ten-year-old system into the present without tearing down what made people rely on it? That principle ran through everything we touched — product, brand, website, sales materials, trade show: modernize what shows, keep what works.
Team
Design (pospolu.design)
Matej Hlavacek, Zavis Pexidr
Client (ProXIV)
Jiří Čtrnáctý, Jiří Čtrnáctý Jr. and their team
Context
Cadet came from inside the industry it serves. ProXIV built it alongside cable producers, led by people who knew the work — Jiří Čtrnáctý, in one customer's words, "a cable man who understands every process." It earned trust: reliable, deeply integrated, the tool people built their whole workflow around.
It also held a space the giants had left behind. Generic ERPs once bent to cable manufacturing, then dropped the specifics and moved on. Cadet filled the gap, accumulating two decades of finely-tuned processes that, as one customer put it, "can't easily be copied."
It wanted to stand on its own as a product, so it could sell abroad. The problem was never really the software, but everything around it. A dated interface, an inconsistent brand, a product hard to explain to anyone seeing it for the first time. The depth was there, but the first impression wasn't.
Challenge
At first glance the job looked obvious: redesign an old ERP. Discovery showed the opposite.
The people who used Cadet every day genuinely liked it. Planners and technologists had built years of optimized work around its density and reliability. The things that looked outdated to an outsider were often holding up highly refined ways of working.
The friction lived on the surface, and with a different audience.
Management and international buyers judged Cadet on first impression — and the first impression said "looks like it's from the last century." As one customer put it: management cares about the visual; the technical team values data integrity and function. The clock was fixed — New Cadet was set to be revealed at Wire Düsseldorf 2026.
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