On September 24, Walmart released a letter to their leafy greens suppliers requiring end-to-end traceability back to farm by September 30, 2019. This mandate is in response to multiple high-profile recalls and outbreaks associated with these types of products. To help their suppliers meet Walmart’s traceability goal, the letter refers suppliers to the IBM Food Trust network, a blockchain solution pioneered through a partnership between Walmart and IBM to improve food safety.

On June 27, 2018, CAT Squared along with dozens of business, government, agriculture, and education leaders from across Arkansas met with Governor Asa Hutchinson and IBM to explore the evolving use of blockchain technology to track the distribution of food from farm to fork. This workshop was a part of the Governor’s new initiative: Blockchain for Arkansas, or BC4AR, an initiative to coordinate and align safety and distribution efforts among key industry leaders.

About two years ago, our training team arrived at a plant to teach plant-floor operators how to use our newly installed MES system to track and manage production data. On the first day of training, an older employee was handed a touchscreen tablet he would now use to perform quality checks. His hand was trembling as he first touched the screen. Our sales representative asked what was wrong, and the gentleman responded that he had only touched a computer once in his life.

On March 20, Cargill Thailand hosted CMT / CAT Squared Modernization Day, a technology event promoting to their employees the work Cargill Meats Thailand is doing with CAT Squared and SAP. CAT Squared specializes in developing MES (manufacturing executions systems) that manages a company’s plant floor and interfaces production data into ERP systems like SAP ERP.

For industrial-scale food producers, staying compliant with a patchwork of state, federal, and international regulations is challenging. The State of Alabama requires commercial manufacturing operations like Mar-Jac to maintain National Type Evaluation Program (NTEP) certification on their weighing and measuring instruments. Not only do the scales and other hardware devices themselves need to be certified, but the software reading data from these devices must also conform to the standards of the National Conference on Weights and Measures, ensuring the manufacturer’s data is accurate.

CAT Squared is working hard to bring our customers the best manufacturing operations management software available in the industry. We are committed to releasing new functionality to our customers three times each year. As a reminder to our customers, new releases are available in January, May, and September.

In last month's feature, we discussed various categories of data-management software systems used in manufacturing. This month, we’ll continue this conversation by more deeply defining the difference between ERP systems and MOM / MES systems and discussing how ERP integration with MES systems empowers manufacturers with real-time business intelligence to make better decisions.

In July, CAT Squared released an update to their SPC software that empowers plant-floor operators with real-time SPC trending data and charts. Production staff can now make adjustments to their plant-floor processes and immediately see how those adjustments impact the quality of the product.