Hostess has teamed up with Promethium to increase the accuracy and speed of data available regarding movement of goods in its warehouse.

Hostess has been a staple of the global food market for more than a hundred years, producing some of the world’s most beloved desserts and baked goods including Sno Balls, HoHos, Ding Dongs and, of course, Twinkies. But even an experienced maker of snacks needs some help streamlining its data and warehousing processes. 

Previously, Hostess was getting data about what was moving through and out of its warehouses via various outdated methods, including Excel spreadsheets, says Jeremy Vance, CIO and vice president of I.T. of Hostess.

Despite moving to a cloud-based data management system, Hostess found it was not able to move massive amounts of data. In search of help, Hostess turned to the relatively new-born California-based company Promethium, headed by CEO, Kaycee Lai. By providing Hostess with access to its cloud-based, data-management platform, Promethium was able to help the business address its issues. 

Hostess chose Promethium in 2020 because, although the data-management tools Hostess needed were already available, using them presented problems. Hostess would have needed to create an entire team to learn the programs, install them and manage those tools. By contrast, Promethium was able to create a “package” whereby Hostess could access all those tools through applications on the Promethium website without needing an entire team of new employees to use them. 

Hostess is now able to gather and disseminate large quantities of data securely via Promethium’s data platform, and to feed that data into online applications that give the company a real-time view of all of its operations, allowing it to cut down operation times. 

That means the ability to track the movement of all goods from one end of its warehouses to the other, providing a real-time look at how quickly products were being moved across facilities and shipped out. While Hostess used to have to wait more than five minutes to stage products in its warehouses, that wait time is now less than 13 seconds. Promethium also reduced Hostess’ data-refresh times from 15 minutes to near real-time.

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Right now, it seems there is room for more collaboration between the two companies, as Hostess continues to look at other KPIs and datasets that could be streamlined. Vance hopes to one day achieve the “perfect order,” where the entire goods movement process goes off without a hitch in the least amount of time possible. He says it seems likely Hostess will be able to attain those service levels by continuing to use Promethium to track and analyze ever more data points. 

“Other people were still kind of living in this legacy mindset in 2019. The tools were already all there in the marketplace. What Kaycee Lai has done with his company is create a way to have the experience of modern Silicon Valley tools without having to find a million people to run them. I get a nice economical package service that provides all those integrated tools together for me in a managed and up-to-date way,” Vance says. 

Resource Links:

Hostess, https://www.hostesscakes.com/

Promethium, https://www.pm61data.com/