CDC Factory

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Litehouse Foods jumpstarts Lean with CDC Factory

HONG KONG, ATLANTA, VANCOUVER, March 1, 2007—

CDC Software today announced that Litehouse Foods Inc. has selected CDC Factory to maximize production efficiency at its plants in Sandpoint (ID) and Lowell (MI).

Litehouse Foods has been established for 40 years and manufactures a wide range of high quality salad dressings, sauces and dips for the retail and foodservice sectors. In recent times however, the dips and dressings market has seen a number of new entrants offering lower-quality budget-price alternatives.

With increased competition and facing steady increases in its fuel and packaging costs, Litehouse implemented a Lean Manufacturing strategy to make sure it was achieving optimum efficiency from its manufacturing plant and personnel. The difficulty they faced was identifying exactly where the opportunities for cost savings and efficiency improvement lay, as much of the existing performance data was recorded on paper and spreadsheets.

Director of IT John Shaw describes the difficulties inherent in delivering vital information in manual formats; "We had a book of reports produced every month, but I eventually took myself off the distribution list. It was like reading a newspaper from last year."

After seeing a presentation of the product at CDC's Ross Systems User Conference, Litehouse Foods evaluated CDC Software's groundbreaking CDC Factory manufacturing software suite, which delivers a combination of plant automation data together with lost-time information (added by production personnel at line-side) to a real-time factory dashboard available at all levels of the organization.

"We immediately saw a great need," recalls John Shaw "and a way to jumpstart the whole Lean process. What struck me was how simple it was and how visually appealing. They clearly had expertise in Food & Beverage and the beauty was we strengthen our relationship with CDC."

It is anticipated that the CDC Software installation will deliver a significant contribution to Litehouse's three immediate objectives – increasing output per man-hour, reducing packaging and raw materials waste and reducing administration time. John Shaw; "CDC Software gives the shopfloor a continuous indicator of how well they're doing and gives the supervisors information they trust. It will give us a handle on our downtime and throughputs and force us to take action."