Background

Founded in 1977 as Custom Corned Beef, Custom Made Meals is a PE-owned manufacturer located in Denver, Colorado and voted as one of the top places to work in the city. Custom Made Meals is a large manufacturer of fresh, oven-ready, value-added entrees and appetizers; known for its unique modified atmospheric packaging. The foods that are packaged by Custom Made Meals have a longer and healthier shelf life for groceries. Selling to over 6,000 grocery locations nationwide, Custom Made Meals is always looking for new recipes and ways to optimize their process.

Challenge‍

Custom Made Meals faced a very particular challenge with their manufacturing process. Similar to many other WorkClout customers, Custom Made Meals was already using a system to track their orders, schedule production, and label their products. Their existing system, however, did not provide a way to visualize their scheduled runs and track production on the factory floor. This gap in their process led to significant delays during production from the time runs are scheduled to the time products are packed.

1. Integration - Using an existing on-prem solution, there was no fast way to solving their production needs that also allowed a synchronous flow of their existing data to a new production schedule and operator portal.
2. Production Schedule - Although a schedule was being populated and tracked on their existing system. There was no way to easily communicate that to the production floor and get immediate feedback.
   
3. Operator Portal - Aside from finished and packaged goods. Tracking production data was non-existent. In addition, making and communicating changes to production was a difficult process.

To sum, Custom Made Meals produces thousands of products around the clock and was tied to an existing system that did not provide an efficient process to schedule and collect floor data for their production runs. This resulted in production mistakes and delays.

Why WorkClout?

WorkClout is built to easily integrate w/ almost any existing cloud-based or on-premise software. In addition, WorkClout’s production schedule alongside their operator portal offered the perfect combination for Custom Made Meals to communicate and get the data they needed to optimize their production process.

1. Integration - The WorkClout team was able to integrate w/ the ERP software, automate job tickets and scheduled runs onto the production schedule. The integration was completed within a few weeks.
2. Production Schedule - Custom Made Meals is now able to visualize live production data, including run times, down times, operator notes, and pauses. In addition, custom reports can be generated over a period of time to identify production bottlenecks.
3. Operator Portal - Leveraging the operator portal. Line managers at Custom Made Meals can now log all run data and view their assigned runs for the day with ease.

Summary

Custom Made Meals has been using WorkClout for a few months now, and within weeks have been able to catch up on all production delays.

“Scheduling has been more effective since we started using [WorkClout], 90 % less mistakes.” 

- IT Manager at Custom Made Meals

To summarize, it’s estimated that Custom Made Meals is now more than 3 weeks ahead of production after adopting WorkClout as a production scheduling and floor reporting alternative to their existing system.