Burn Those Spreadsheets.

This article focuses on a technology for streamlining production, packaging and inventory management at manufacturing firms. The Aberdeen group said that 82% of all manufacturers use spreadsheets for production planning and scheduling. However, food manufacturers See's Candy and Wise Foods gave up their spreadsheets and transitioned to a single platform for production planning, packaging, and inventory management. The changes taking place in these two companies are part of the trend toward demand-driven manufacturing; that is. pulling from the retailer rather than pushing from the supplier, to compress throughput or cash-to-cycle time. See's Candy saved $200, 000 when it transitioned its Northern California manufacturing and packaging plant from Excel spreadsheets to a single platform. Aside from that, scheduling production that once took a full day now takes just hours, resulting in more control of the manufacturing process, lower inventory levels, and better response times. Both Wise and See's have something else in common: neither one is Procter &, Gamble. Each brings in around $400 million in revenue. And both companies used the single platform of JRG because it offered Web-based software as a service.