Centric Software®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, is pleased to announce that CTI Foods, the custom food-service manufacturer, has selected Centric PLM® for their business. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, home décor, consumer electronics, cosmetics, food & beverage and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Headquartered in Saginaw, Texas, CTI Foods serves the restaurant and industrial ingredient industries with proteins, soups, sauces and dressing innovations through six USDA-approved production facilities. The CTI R&D team creates chef-led, custom, proprietary products for their customers, many of them well-known QSR restaurants, providing maximum quality and value.
The company’s manufacturing plants are spread across the US and CTI is moving toward centralizing certain operations. Director of Research and Development, Les Thiel says, “It is a challenge to transfer information among plants and functional groups. There was an obvious need to have one source of truth in product development. Having to look through and find the latest email or Excel document became a source of frustration.” Each plant was operating somewhat independently with different workflows and ingredients. “PLM gives us the opportunity to get a lot of that sorted out. I think it’ll improve the efficiency with which we can manage product development and products in general, as we get into this one source of truth.”
CTI decided they needed PLM and researched different vendors, viewing demos, presentations and posing questions of each. In the end, the functionality and user interface of Centric PLM won CTI over. Thiel says, “It is modern and it looks familiar to people. Being able to drag and drop things to create graphs and view charts or bring in other columns of data is simple and user-friendly.”
To boost efficiency, an objective is to get all product developers using the tool. Says Thiel, “We’re hoping that with Centric’s interface, we’ll be able to really encourage user adoption; that it’ll become our R&D developers go-to place to do work on a day-to-day basis and not a chore where you’re re-entering information at the end of a project, just to get that nutrition statement or regulatory approval.”
Another priority is to consolidate and standardize names and numbers for ingredients across the company, giving procurement accurate volumes, which they can then use to negotiate better pricing from ingredient suppliers.
Centric PLM will be used for product development, quality, regulatory, specifications, project management, finance. Thiel says, “We’re looking to have our Stage Gate process operational in PLM.”
President and CEO of Centric Software, Chris Groves says, “We are excited that CTI Foods has chosen Centric PLM for their business. The formulation, specification management and of course, workflows, will drive efficiency into the product development process after implementation, for which we will be there every step of the way.”
