Cheese Plant Automation

Challenge

Meister Cheese had an inventory system that needed manual input of each day’s production. This lead to always being a day behind in knowing what inventory they had. It also did not keep track of pallet movement if a pallet was moved from its original reported location. Different people in the office kept their own spread sheets of inventory to try and manage their part of the process but having multiple versions of inventory would lead to discrepancies and no one being sure which one was right. The shipping department had to wait for the orders department to tell them what product to ship and where to find it, which many times was not accurate. All other processes in the system were also manual from lab testing results to generating the COA reports, so being able to go through an audit was very time consuming.

Solution

All production lines were automated with Scale Fusion, our automated labeling and inventory management software package. Scale Fusion was installed on each production line, where it tracked weight totals by case, pallet, and product. These data were instantly submitted to inventory through Data Manager, the inventory and product database compliment to Scale Fusion.

Invoicing was simplified with Data Manager, a software program that tracked customers and pricing agreements, automated inventory assignment to orders, and generated reports on demand—from bills of lading and invoices to lab results and certificates of analysis. Scale Fusion was customized for Meister Cheese to automatically email the customer all required shipping documents as a PDF file as soon as the shipment was processed. Price calculations were automatically performed by Data Manager, ensuring accuracy and accelerating invoice processing.

The Results

Automating the package labeling process with Scale Fusion increased productivity, accuracy, and minimized the delay between product shipment and invoice delivery. Labels and product information could be modified without losing two-to-four weeks of production time. Our client can forecast order needs and set up the production schedule far ahead of the previous limitation of only a few days in advance. Automating the inventory process meant product was immediately available for order assignment and shipment, removing the previous week-long delay between shipments and invoices dependent on the by-hand calculation process.