Solo Cup Overhauls Innovation Processes

The current economic downturn has hit retail and consumer products companies particularly hard, and closely managing margin in today's environment can be a matter of life or death. Despite these market pressures, Solo Cup Company has developed a winning strategy by tackling them head on. This leader in foodservice and consumer disposables identified the need to overhaul its processes around recipe management as a means of streamlining the end-to-end product lifecycle.

 

On September 8, 2011, during a CGT web seminar, Carol Rascia, senior manager PMO and Quality for Solo Cup, revealed how the company replaced a legacy mainframe recipe management system with a modern application and supporting processes in less than 150 days. The following are some highlights from the web event:

 

--Rascia revealed how Solo Cup has also been able to ensure adoption by managing the cultural, organizational and technical challenges; dramatically enhancing collaboration and visibility; and greatly improving process efficiency. She also explained how the company was able to eliminate redundancies leading to loss productivity, errors and decreases in customer satisfaction. More importantly, Rascia discussed the lessons that Solo Cup learned along its journey, including what the company did and didn’t do well. Rascia closed by saying that Solo Cup now has “a truly integrated platform from which we can launch new products. Earlier we had data; now we have information.”

 

--Brian Soaper, PLM Solution principal for SAP, was also on hand to offer some thought leadership for consumer goods companies who are looking to achieve faster product launches in their organizations. He explained how the value of embedded product lifecycle management can capture the voice of the customer, integrate product development, integrate product change and more. Soaper believes that functional optimization alone is not enough, and in order to be successful, companies need to make decisions, collaborate and operate better simultaneously.

 

To listen to this event in its entirety, click here.