Natures Way moves to real-time reporting at UK plants

Chichester, UK – Natures Way Foods is installing a manufacturing operations management system from CDC Software Corporation at its UK operations. The food company, which is a long-time user of CDC’s Ross ERP system, plans to implement CDC Factory at its Runcton and Selsey plants.

Natures Way, which supplies fresh produce including prepared bagged salads and fruit to major retailers and food service companies, wants to transition from existing ’daily, weekly operational reporting’ structure to a real-time environment.

The new software is intended to move the company to hourly, short interval control practices and provide real-time metrics such as OEE, throughput and cost per case. This, said CDC, will help the company’s shopfloor teams to optimise plant performance levels.

CDC Factory is said to present information at a stock keeping unit (SKU) and production line level in an easy to understand format, which enables factory workers to make timely adjustments and measure immediate improvements on the plant floor. Production managers can also get detailed performance statistics and root causes of efficiencies for mid-shift and end-of-shift meetings.

“Our continued growth demands required us to unlock greater capacity from our existing equipment and people,” said Richard Parr, Natures Way’s head of operations. “We realised our existing measurement and control tools could no longer support our mounting requirements in this area. We believe that CDC Factory will help us follow short interval control methods that are expected to help us improve plant capacity.”