The CAT Squared User Summit is designed to add value to food production operations by sharing best practices in the industry for adopting new technology to manufacturing processes.

CAT Squared has partnered with UniSoma to disrupt the food-processing software industry with the launch of TacticalOps, our planning & optimization tool designed for food manufacturers. This exciting planning & optimization tool empowers food manufacturers with the ability to capture and manage real-time data from the plant floor and, using prescriptive analytics, peer into the future to make better decisions. UniSoma’s previous successes implementing planning and optimization tools based on predictive and prescriptive analytics yielded increased production efficiencies and improvements in planning accuracy. JBS reported an increase in the contribution margin of over 20% due to the use of UniSoma’s Meat Chain Optimizer. In another example, BRF reported $50 million in savings over a three-year period.

In the following article, Jesús Membreño (poultry group MES lead at Cargill) shares his knowledge gained during a multi-site implementation of the CAT2 MES (Manufacturing Execution System) for Cargill Central America. The implementation included integration into plant-floor hardware as well as the company’s ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning) to maximize data management capabilities by harnessing the power of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things). By using the multi-plant benchmarking process, Cargill creates meaningful, shareable knowledge from many terabytes of data.

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.

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.

CAT Squared is proud to announce a new partnership with  AIMMS, an award-winning vendor of Prescriptive Analytics software, and UniSoma, a leading provider of Advanced Planning solutions. The partnership will enable AIMMS, UniSoma and CAT Squared to provision prescriptive analytics applications for food processing and production companies.

One of the hot topics at February's annual meeting of the National Turkey Federation (NTF) was the Turkey Demand Project. In 2015, U.S. consumption of turkey was 16.0 pounds per person. NTF’s goal is to increase per-person turkey consumption to 20 pounds by 2020.