12-Plant Manufacturing & Logistics Planning
End-to-end system delivery for a major food packaging manufacturer — from process mapping through integration with accounting and HR, plus 24/7 post-implementation support
The Challenge
The client is a major U.S. manufacturer of food service packaging — disposable cups, lids, containers, and food-service items — with 12 plant locations across the United States serving major restaurant chains, food service distributors, and retail grocers. The company’s production planning and supply chain spanned everything from customer order intake through manufacturing scheduling, raw-material planning, finished-goods inventory, distribution to plants and distribution centers, and final customer shipment.
The client needed an end-to-end manufacturing planning capability that could (1) plan production across all 12 plants with awareness of capacity, materials, scheduling constraints, and order priorities, (2) optimize the full operational process from order through shipment, (3) integrate with the company’s accounting and HR systems for unified financial and resource visibility, and (4) be operable by plant-level staff without requiring a dedicated IT specialist at every site. The initiative also needed to identify and address risk and disruption points in the existing process — and to enable re-planning when actual conditions diverged from plan.
The Solution
Applied Decision Technologies delivered the full engagement: requirements gathering, process analysis, software development, implementation, change management, and post-implementation support — all under a single integrated delivery model.
The engagement began with a comprehensive process-mapping exercise. ADecTec analyzed the current production planning and supply-chain management process from customer orders through customer shipments at all 12 plant locations. Internal operational functionalities were process-mapped, several what-if scenarios were evaluated, and the complete process was optimized before any code was written. This optimized process became the specification basis for the platform itself — ensuring that the software encoded a deliberately optimized operating model rather than just automating the legacy process.
The platform was then built and deployed to integrate seamlessly with the client’s accounting and HR systems, providing a unified view of operational, financial, and workforce data. User training and documentation were delivered for plant-level staff in coordination with the client’s internal teams. Throughout, ADecTec coordinated with multiple geographically dispersed teams — the 12 U.S. plant locations, the client’s central operations, and ADecTec development teams in two countries — under a single integrated delivery model.
After implementation, ADecTec provided 24/7 post-implementation application support, addressing operational issues across the 12-plant network without requiring the client to staff a dedicated internal IT support organization for the platform.
Outcomes
The client operated the platform as the production-planning and supply-chain backbone across all 12 plants for the duration of the engagement. The project was completed successfully — within the agreed $1.4M budget and on schedule — and ADecTec retained the post-implementation support relationship throughout the operational lifetime of the platform.
The integration with accounting and HR systems unified operational and financial visibility. The optimized underlying process — designed before code was written — meant that the system encoded the deliberately better operating model rather than the legacy one. The 24/7 post-implementation support model meant that the client did not have to choose between modern manufacturing-planning capability and the operational reliability of a system that someone was actively responsible for at all hours.
Why It Matters
Multi-plant manufacturing operations are unforgiving environments for software. A planning system that drifts out of sync with the shop floor, fails to integrate cleanly with finance, or requires specialist IT support at every plant becomes a liability faster than it becomes an asset.
This engagement is a complete case study in how to avoid those failure modes: optimize the process first, build the software to the optimized process, integrate cleanly across functional systems, train the plant-level users, and operate the platform under 24/7 support so the system stays as reliable as the manufacturing operation it supports.
For any multi-site manufacturer or distribution operation contemplating a similar end-to-end planning transformation, ADecTec brings a multi-year, completed, on-budget reference engagement.