Improving Performance with Real-Time Visibility and Quality
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Aptean Factory MES
Tech Stack
- Not mentioned
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Litehouse Foods is a leading manufacturer of refrigerated salad dressings, cheeses, dips, sauces, cider, and freeze dried herbs. The company is well-known for their invention of creamy bleu cheese dressing. Established over 50 years ago by the Hawkins family, Litehouse has remained a 100% employee-owned company since 2014. Today, Litehouse operates as a 300 million dollar company and continues to maintain their focus on growth, driven by their passionate employees. Since 2007, Litehouse has relied on Aptean Factory MES to drive continuous improvement and better streamline their production processes, both of which they’ve accomplished through their active participation in the Factory MES community.
The Challenge
Litehouse Foods, a leading manufacturer of refrigerated salad dressings, cheeses, dips, sauces, cider, and freeze dried herbs, was operating under a paper-based system across their four production facilities. They were monitoring and recording metrics like downtime manually. Their existing system of record made the creation of reports difficult and offered little real-time visibility, causing them to overlook a substantial amount of downtime. At the time, Lithouse had over 400 downtime codes per line and an impression that they were operating at a much higher utilization and OEE than they actually were. It was this manual process that drove them to seek out a solution that would eliminate the need for paper, while simultaneously providing opportunities to optimize performance and eliminate errors.
The Solution
Litehouse Foods implemented Aptean Factory MES in 2007 to drive continuous improvement and better streamline their production processes. The system was rolled out in about two weeks and was received extremely well across the organization. The solution provided real-time metrics and SPC trends displayed on operator screens, which fostered an uptake in interest and investment in the business’ operations. In addition to improving the metrics they had always tracked, such as uptime and downtime, Litehouse gained visibility into metrics they had never focused on prior to implementing Factory MES. With no previous record of tracking their yield or run rate, the company decided to dive into these uncharted territories and disrupt their system of assigning the same cost to every product running on a specific line.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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