Caldwell Foods Group

Caldwell Foods operated two production facilities in Indiana, manufacturing snack and specialty food products for regional grocery and foodservice distributors. Production scheduling was managed in a master Excel workbook maintained by a single production planner. Every morning, the planner spent the first hour reconciling the previous day's actuals — units produced, materials consumed, inventory adjustments — before the current day's schedule could be finalized.

On-time delivery had plateaued at 68%. The root causes were predictable: schedules were built without real-time inventory visibility, so production would start a batch, discover a raw material shortage mid-run, and have to either wait for an emergency receiving order or substitute a lot — sometimes in violation of recipe specifications.

FIFO rotation wasn't enforced at the lot level. Operators picked raw materials by proximity, not date. The result was elevated waste from expired or near-expiry stock and inconsistent product quality tied to older input lots.

Caldwell deployed MFX across five modules, with the deployment sequenced to address the planning and inventory problems first.

PPM replaced the Excel scheduling workbook. Production schedules are now built against live inventory balances — the planner sees material availability in real time, and the system flags potential shortages at scheduling time rather than mid-run. RECV linked inbound deliveries directly to the production calendar, so arriving material updates available inventory the moment it's received and checked in.

INV enforced FIFO at the lot level. Operators are shown the correct lot to consume; the system validates consumption against the lot plan before the batch closes. LM built a continuous consumption history from each input lot to each finished goods lot, enabling traceability queries without manual document review.

DASH gave supervisors and the production planner a real-time view of production status, inventory positions, and inbound receiving across both facilities — without requiring floor walks or phone calls to get a current picture.

On-time delivery climbed from 68% to 92% in the six months following full deployment — a 35% improvement driven primarily by the elimination of mid-run material shortages. The number of mid-run production interruptions due to material availability dropped from approximately six per month to zero.

Raw material waste decreased 28% as FIFO enforcement reduced the number of lots expiring in storage. The daily planning reconciliation hour was eliminated; the planner now spends that time on forward-looking schedule optimization rather than correcting yesterday's actuals.