For Sunsweet Growers in Yuba City, Calif., the implementation of Supply Chain Consultants' Zemeter software has allowed the marketing cooperative to bring its supply chain improvement plans to fruition.

According to Harold Upton, vice president of strategic business processes for the world's largest dried fruit company, the Zemeter supply chain management software replaced time-consuming manual processes with automated ones to gain better visibility throughout its supply chain.

"These changes to Sunsweet's supply chain have resulted in a 15 to 20 percent increase in forecasting accuracy, and a reduction in overtime from 30 to 10 percent," says Upton, who adds that Zemeter has enabled Sunsweet to increase its product utilization by two percent, and cost management has increased by three to five percent overall.

Additionally, Sunsweet has increased the efficiency of its pitter, once a source of the majority of bottlenecks in the production line, from 92 percent to 98 percent. According to Upton, Sunsweet was able to realize its return on investment on the Supply Chain Consultants software after only about six and a half months-before the project was even completed.

"An increase in overall line utilization from 94 to 98 percent resulted in a substantial cost savings that could not have been achieved without an integrated supply chain planning suite," he says.

According to Upton, SCC's Zemeter implementation has changed Sunsweet's view of how the company does modeling and organizational planning. All areas of the organization are now able to access and share the same data to better understand each other's role in the supply chain. SCC and Zemeter made it possible for Sunsweet to replace its spreadsheets with an integrated supply chain planning suite covering forecasting, collaboration, inventory planning, supply planning, and finite scheduling, thus enabling the company to generate a statistical forecast based on history rather than guesswork. "Sunsweet is now able to perform a product cost analysis in four to five hours instead of the days it took before implementing Zemeter," says Upton.