Complete Plant Automation: Mulllins Cheese

Project Overview:

Family-owned Mullins Cheese operates two plants in northern Wisconsin, and wanted to automate production to meet growing demand. The company’s inventory and customer ordering procedures were all performed by hand, preventing the company from acquiring accurate and timely production totals and forecasting order needs. StrategyBytes, LLC installed Scale Fusion, which now automates labeling on the production line, adds product to inventory, adds inventory to shipping orders, and manages customer profiles and invoicing.

Challenge:

Mullins Cheese specialized in offering customized labels for each customer; however, depending on the scale to generate a label for each product meant that when a label change was requested, the production line needed to be shut down while the scale technician created a new label. Inventory was calculated by-hand from weigh tapes. Invoicing and pricing were dependent upon each customer’s negotiated price over market price, meaning employees needed to collect several numbers before generating the final invoicing document. Because the by-hand calculations for each step were so time-consuming, the production schedule could only be projected a few days in advance.

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 Mullins 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.

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.