Driving company-wide cost savings at DCC with CADDi

Modern stumbling blocks for procurement 

Since its founding in 1954, Dairy Conveyor Corp. (DCC) Automation has become a trusted name in hygienic and innovative automation, offering high-quality conveyor systems, robotic palletizers, and custom control panels. With recent accolades like the 2024 Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork OEM Innovation Award for its Hygienic Robotic Packaging System, DCC Automation continues to lead advancements in the food and beverage sectors.

Their key projects, including palletizers and casers, often involved up to 800 separate line items, resulting in a lengthy procurement process. External factors further complicated this process, making efficiency a challenge. In the modern era of supply chain disruption and complexity, DCC recognized the need to re-evaluate their procurement costs. Factors such as geopolitical relations, ongoing and upcoming tariffs, and material shortages can make previously viable purchasing strategies less sustainable, prompting a strategic re-evaluation.

Unfortunately, making these new procurement strategic decisions requires a lot of experience and expertise. DCC found that the required knowledge was inadequately distributed among different teams, ending up in silos and known only by specific individuals. Existing data management structures, like ERP tools or Solidworks, made the data technically available, but not easily accessible. Different teams working in different systems had a hard time sharing insights and information.

On top of this, a specific initiative in one of DCC’s branches was to consolidate suppliers based on expertise. This is a complicated procurement initiative that requires a lot of manual cross-referencing and expertise – knowing where to find categories of component parts that are similar enough, and finding the ideal quality-price tradeoff point for each category. Processes such as these, that require specific experts to track down data, slow the entire company’s progress towards their goals by taking these people away from other valuable work. The most valuable procurement experts were being stretched too thin.

Unlocking efficiency in procurement with AI-driven analysis and statistics

Fortunately, this problem, very typical in modern procurement departments, has a modern solution: CADDi. By implementing CADDi, DCC achieved a reduction in fabricated part spend of 22%, achieving the target of their initiative.

Monica Merando, Director of Purchasing at DCC discovered CADDi while researching cost reduction strategies. She searched online for tools that could help consolidate suppliers and find similarity across parts in an automated and consistent way. This searching led her to CADDi’s case studies. On the first introduction call, Monica illustrated that her company relied on vendors to provide non-standard cost guidance for a wide variety of parts. This amplified the cost differential between similar parts with little rationale for the variance, leading to reduced profitability and longer lead time for full custom machines. CADDi solved these discrepancies by linking data and making it searchable. 

After CADDi was adopted, the process of evaluating suppliers became a far more automatic initiative, even for new employees. Junior buyers at DCC could start making more impactful decisions without relying on the expertise of a few people. Monica Merando, Director of Purchasing, used to personally review each print and recommend a supplier. With CADDi, she can focus on more value-added tasks, spending less time on answering questions and tracking down data.

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"By using CADDi Drawer, I have reduced my workflow time by over 80%- what once took an entire week can now be completed in a single afternoon, giving me more time to focus on other projects."
- Monica Merando, Director of Purchasing

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This massive unlock in efficiency reduces the time it takes to onboard new people into the procurement department. Katrina, a junior member of the procurement team, has already made over 702 keyword searches with CADDi. Each of these searches would ordinarily require digging through ERP systems manually, with each search taking an order of magnitude longer. A search process that would have taken 40 hours before now takes only 4.

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"It makes my life so much easier, I can sit at my desk and look at CADDi instead of running around with a tape measure."
- Danny Harris, Expediter

Creating a data lake with CADDi to achieve supplier consolidation

CADDi achieves these goals by connecting data across tools and silos, and surfacing it with more intuitive searches. It functions as a data lake, taking data from all sources and connecting it. DCC uses this to find past order pricing, quality data, and design data for any given part simultaneously, rather than requiring manual cross-referencing.

For example, here’s a common task that was vastly accelerated by CADDi. Monica needs to proactively negotiate with suppliers to ensure optimal profitability. This required surfacing and comparing hundreds of individual orders for each project, an exercise that would typically take five business days. With CADDi, Monica can now just paste a list of IDs into the advanced search function and instantly get a CSV file with all of the old order information. She could skip immediately to the analysis and evaluation stage, reducing this exercise from a whole business week to a few hours. With the time she saved on information gathering, she was able to implement a brand-new inventory barcode system. Automating low-value tedious tasks led to compounding efficiency and accelerating high-value additions.

Other high-value tasks that can be difficult to focus on proactively can be unlocked with CADDi. Supplier consolidation becomes far easier. Using cutting-edge machine vision technology, CADDi can automatically group together similar parts using the design of the part itself. You can search with one part drawing to find all the other similar part drawings in your system.

When DCC launched their initiative to consolidate suppliers for their caster production in Minnesota, they first needed to understand which components were currently coming from each supplier. That is, they needed to know which suppliers were providing wheels, which were providing housings, etc. and what prices each supplier was quoting for each type of part. Before CADDi, this would be an extremely time consuming task, requiring a lot of expert judgment. There would be no way to simply search for “housing” or “wheel”. It would require manual sorting to categorize correctly.

DCC implemented CADDi in their initiative for supplier consolidation in caster production. This allowed them to categorize parts into these categories automatically, just by the components of the drawing. CADDi also automatically surfaces all of the relevant information for each part to decide on supplier – previous costs, quality data, design revisions, and more.

"By digitizing and organizing our design data, CADDi enables us to improve team collaboration across sites and streamline the procurement process.

This partnership positions us to more effectively manage costs and elevate our efficiency across the board."
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- Monica Merando, Director of Purchasing

Procurement will likely only increase in complexity as tariffs and shortages complicate existing plans. With CADDi, DCC has the fast and consistent access to data required to make the right changes, fast.

Monica is excited to continue implementing CADDi across DCC. By integrating it into engineering and aftermarket teams, and adopting the new CADDi Quote, she anticipates even more success in improved efficiency and cost reduction.