Sugar Foods Sweetens New Product Launch Processes

At Sugar Foods Corporation (www.sugarfoods.com), it is standard practice to find ways to say "yes" to customers when others can't. The company is one of North America's largest distributors of sweeteners and salad toppings in the foodservice industry. In retail, the N'Joy brand and Fresh Gourmet products are in its portfolio.

Over the last few years, the number of new products and product changes that the company manages has grown exponentially. In addition, well-publicized food recalls led to an increase in the amount of information that customers now routinely request for risk mitigation and product information purposes.

"We've grown beyond our ability to manage the volume of information required with paper records, spreadsheets and disjointed electronic systems," says Phil Wetherington, chief information officer, Sugar Foods.

The company needed a solution to bring new product development, change management and product specifications together into a cohesive whole. It found that solution -- Oracle's Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) for Process (www.oracle.com) -- in June 2009 and went live in August 2009.

With Agile PLM for Process, Sugar Foods has greater visibility throughout the product lifecycle, which allows it to reduce product costs, ensure compliance and traceability, and improve productivity. The company uses a new product development module to manage interdepartmental workflow and to track the status of all projects from inception to launch using a stage-gate methodology.

"Instead of managing one large project list as we did before, we now more effectively manage project portfolios based on market channel and project type," says Wetherington.

In addition, a global specifications management module manages ingredient and nutritional specifications, with formula and trade specifications to follow.