CPG MANUFACTURING - Crosby Foods DTO Use Case

Crosby Foods is a Canadian CPG manufacturer/co-manufacturer with over 120 employees producing 160+ wet and dry SKUs across 10 production lines, serving both retail and industrial customers. Like many mid-sized manufacturers, Crosby’s faced challenges with:

• Limited visibility into production capacity and resource utilization 
• Difficulty sustaining continuous improvement (CI) initiatives 
• Inaccurate product costing and profitability insights 
• Fragmented inputs for budgeting and capital investment decisions 

These constraints created a need for a more integrated, data-driven planning capability.

Key Problem Statement

Crosby’s lacked a unified model to:

• Accurately simulate production constraints and throughput 
• Understand true cost-to-produce across diverse SKUs 
• Align operations, finance, and CI teams around consistent data 
• Support forward-looking planning and investment decisions 

CBP-DTO Solution Approach

Crosby’s implemented a Digital Twin of the Organization (DTO) using Collaborative Business Planning (CBP), supported by the QualiWare platform. Key elements of the approach included:

• Building a constraint-based operational model across all production lines 
• Grouping 160+ SKUs into 45 process-based product families for modeling efficiency 
• Capturing: 
  • Process flows and activities 
  • Labour and equipment requirements 
  • Production rates, setup times, and capacities 
• Integrating operational and financial data from: 
  • ERP (Syspro) 
  • Production tracking systems 
  • Shop-floor interviews       

The DTO model enabled end-to-end simulation of production, resource utilization, and cost flows.

Key Capabilities Enabled by CBP

Crosby Foods needed a unified model representing 160+ SKUs across 10 production lines — aligning Production, CI, and Finance teams around consistent operational data. Capabilities included: 

• End-to-End Operational Visibility
  Single integrated model of production, support activities, and cost flows 
• Constraint-Based Planning
  Identification of bottlenecks across labour, equipment, and production lines 
• Scenario Simulation
  Evaluation of CI initiatives, staffing changes, and production adjustments before execution 
• Integrated Costing & Profitability Analysis
  Activity-based costing tied directly to operational flows, improving cost accuracy 
• Cross-Functional Alignment
  Unified model used by Production, CI, and Finance teams 

Quantified Business Benefits

Completed in ~3 months, the Crosby DTO delivered some of the most quantifiable outcomes in CBP’s manufacturing portfolio — spanning capacity, costing, and financial return. Benefits included: 

  Operational Efficiency

• 160 hours of additional annual production capacity identified through utilization improvements      
• 200 hours of annual labour savings gained through optimized sanitation labour and reduced downtime 

  Financial Impact

• Identification of over and under-costed products, improving pricing and margin decisions 
• Enabled more accurate labour, material, and production cost forecasting 

  Decision Quality

• Data-driven justification of capital investment in a plant management system 
• DTO project delivered ~50% first-year ROI 

  Continuous Improvement Enablement

• Structured platform to evaluate and prioritize Lean improvement initiatives 
• Improved visibility into non-value-added activities 

Implementation Timeline: ~ 3 months to initial pilot DTO

• Phase 1:  Process discovery and data collection (3-4 weeks)
• Phase 2:  CBP-DTO model build and validation (4-6 weeks)
• Phase 3:  Scenario analysis and stakeholder alignment (4 – 6+ weeks)