How Bush Brothers Increased Quality to 96.2% with TrakSYS

The Bush family company started more than 100 years ago in Tennessee as a canning business, focused primarily on canning fruits and vegetables. In 1952, everything changed when the company began producing table-ready products, and with the development of Bush's secret family recipe baked beans, Bush Brothers quickly became the largest provider of canned beans in the world.

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Already producing more than 55 million pounds of beans annually, Bush Brothers needed a way to optimize its operation to meet increasing customer demand. Working with Parsec, Bush Brothers set out to implement a TrakSYS solution that would help it do just that.

Bush Brothers' operations were heavily paper-based, with disparate implementations and a lack of real-time data across the plant. That left minimal visibility into the root causes of production downtimes, making it difficult to know where to focus improvement efforts.

Bush Brothers and Parsec determined that a phased rollout, with the goal of implementing TrakSYS throughout the entire factory, was the best approach. The integrated architecture gave Bush Brothers unprecedented, comprehensive real-time visibility into its manufacturing processes. To achieve that visibility, the team integrated TrakSYS with its existing ERP system to optimize planning and scheduling, its SCADA system to gather production data, and its plant historian to monitor statistical process control. Operator-specific workstations were also installed throughout the factory.

Bush Brothers increased quality to 96.2%, improved production efficiency to over 86%, and increased on-time order fulfillment to 99.7%. Every OEE point improvement now saves the company $395,000, and TrakSYS has helped Bush Brothers produce 2.2 million additional cases of product a year while achieving 97.9% planned versus actual production.

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The team now meets production goals with 27 fewer shifts and saw a return on investment in less than one year.