Customer Profile

For more than 20 years, Global Harvest Foods has been a leading provider of specialty seed products that include wild and caged bird food, small animal food, and lawn and garden products. With Headquarters in Seattle, WA and production facilities located throughout America, Global Harvest Foods offers fresh raw materials for production and provides their customers with consistent, quality products.

Challenges

Global Harvest Foods determined that management needed better visibility into business operations as well as production and manufacturing for their facilities. Global Harvest also needed more insight in order to drive better performance and monitor results. Specifically, the solution needed to deliver executive-level dashboards as well as be able to provide real-time production stats for manufacturing managers and employees.

However, to do this, Global Harvest needed to tap into data in Microsoft SQL Server databases, an ERP system, and a variety of other, smaller databases used for reporting.  Additionally, Global Harvest needed to take data from these disparate systems and provide a single view. When evaluating solutions, Global Harvest’s IT department stressed the importance of flexibility and scalability as well as the ability to consolidate all of its disparate data sources because any new solution would need to grow with the company’s evolving technology needs.

Solution

Using Visual Mining’s award-winning NetCharts Performance Dashboards (NCPD) Global Harvest Foods can easily and quickly connect to multiple data sources and present information in a single, compelling dashboard.

Results

Global Harvest created and uses executive dashboards for a view of a daily balanced scorecard as well as bi-monthly labor analysis reports to quickly evaluate payroll data.

Following executive management’s success with NCPD, manufacturing/ plant managers at Global Harvest Foods production locations deployed NCPD for monitoring and evaluating manufacturing performance.

Using NetCharts, plant managers are able to show their employees a visual depiction of the work they have completed at the end of every shift. With a better understanding of inefficiencies within each line and greater insight into the production process, employees now look for ways to improve and streamline the production lines so that they can reach their daily goals.

When considering other data visualization solutions, Global Harvest Foods’ IT Director Rod Epps noted, “The more expensive solutions couldn’t offer the flexibility and scalability we needed and found with NetCharts Performance Dashboards, Server and Designer. Efficiency is what drives our business, and NetCharts software helps us visualize our production and operational processes to ensure that we run our business efficiently and effectively.”