They do all manufacturing and processing for protein and biotech products in the United States, in the Midwest. In order to meet the increasing demand for their products, they must open new processing plants and improve existing ones. Their plants, predominantly automated, normally operate close to 365 days a year, 24/7. To ensure safety and efficiency, they periodically do what’s called in this industry a plant “shut down”, wherein we close the plant for 90 hours for equipment review, process review, maintenance and cleaning in order to improve plant operations.

The Challenge - keep projects, resource and costs in check
They needed a solution to help manage this complex project and keep resource allocations and costs in check. In the past, they had relied on word documents, email, and spreadsheets, trying to keep on top of and share the massive amounts of information across all members of the team. "It was becoming next to impossible. One shut down cost us $150K due to delays and poor planning. Until we purchased Genius Project 4 Domino, V 5.0 by Genius Inside."

The Solution - Genius Project4Domino requires no additional hardware or software investment
"One aspect that we like about Genius solution is the ease and low cost of deployment. I was actually able to set up the system on my own client without any help from IT in an hour. That’s pretty unusual." They quickly set it up for all departments members. And because it runs right on existing Domino mail servers, additional servers weren’t required. "We had been searching for project management solutions for several months and evaluated several. We even set up controlled test of another web based solution. In order to run this solution, we had to purchase a dedicated server, Oracle DB software running on Linux plus the Oracle licenses. Plus we had to spend a lot of time configuring things to support single sign on. It was both expensive, time consuming, and complicated to set up. Genius’ prices were very reasonable and required no additional hardware or software investment."

The Results - collaboration between to all team members
Genius Project4Domino has allowed them to have one location to develop and store all of their project related material – project plan with milestones, timelines and deliverables; resource allocation; project cost assessment and risk; and reports. And all members of the team can access it and , almost more importantly, they can see how their work affects other team members and the project as a whole. "We never had that before. Welders and electricians were bumping into each other because they couldn’t tell how their work affected the others!"

Additionally, because Genius Project4Domino was designed on Domino, it allows them to use either Notes based clients or the web to access our data. They do a lot of business in China where internet access is often very unreliable. The fact that Mr. Lohry can replicate this project material in Genius from its client on his laptop is incredibly valuable when doing business there.

"We recently ran another plant “shut down” which went incredibly well, thanks to the Genius solution." The project ran smoothly, on time, and on budget. We improved plant capacity by 20%.

In addition, they are in a joint development partnership with a Korean based company to develop fermented soy products. They are using the Genius system as well to work with Nutra-Flo and it works great!

Future - Global expansion to all departments
They have also expanded the use of Genius Project4Domino into two other areas of our business: (1) marketing department. Now Nutra-Flo Director of World Wide marketing, who is based in Minneapolis, Minesota, can easily see what product development plans the product teams have input and develop his launch and marketing plans remotely. And (2) our Safety Auditing team uses Genius Project4Domino to manage process safety audits (OSHA requires that we periodically audit our internal processes) which helps them to stay in compliance. "We plan to roll it out corporate wide by the end of the year, starting with our executive team."

Conclusion
"We have been very happy with Genius Inside’s responsiveness and support. They have been extremely helpful to us throughout our deployment. We feel this is a truly great solution for companies looking for collaborative, in depth, analytical project management tools.", says Eric J. Lohry.

Eric J. Lohry, President of Nutra-Flo