Food MANUFACTURING - Made with local DTO Use Case

Made with Local is a small energy bar and cookie manufacturer located in Windsor, NS, with major retail customers and online sales across Canada. Operating a food manufacturing environment with multiple production lines and strict hygiene requirements, Made with Local sought to improve production efficiency, output capacity, and cost accuracy to support rapid business growth. As a fast-growing food manufacturer, Made with Local faced challenges with:

• Limited visibility into labour efficiencies and true resource utilization across product lines
• Unclear product and customer-specific costing across retail channels and online sales
• Process bottlenecks and the impact of product waste and scrap not well quantified
• Production floor data quality insufficient to support operational planning and costing decisions

These constraints created a need for a more integrated, data-driven operational and financial planning capability to support scaling.

Key Problem Statement

Made with Local lacked a unified model to:

• accurately represent the full resource structure for production, packaging, warehousing, and overhead
• develop accurate individual product and customer-specific packaging and handling costs
• identify process bottlenecks and evaluate improvement opportunities with confidence before implementation

CBP-DTO Solution Approach

Made with Local implemented a Digital Twin of the Organization (DTO) using Collaborative Business Planning (CBP), supported by the QualiWare platform. The DTO modeling scope covered the entire resource structure for the business, including:

• Two separate production/forming lines for bars and cookies with a common blending/mixing process
• Packaging line and warehousing operations covering receiving, inventory, and shipping
• Product changeovers, scrap and rework, hygiene and facility & equipment cleaning
• Senior management, production management, operator labour, facility, equipment, utilities, and BOM

Data sources included “Hub” (Made with Local’s in-house ERP database), labour and equipment efficiency data from interviews and observations, and online sales data from Shopify.

Key Capabilities Enabled by CBP

For a fast-growing food manufacturer with multiple product lines and hygiene requirements, CBP-DTO delivered the integrated operational and financial visibility needed to scale. Capabilities included:

• End-to-End Operational Visibility

         Single integrated model of production, packaging, warehousing, and support activities across both bar and cookie lines

• Granular Product and Customer Costing
  Accurate individual product costs and specific packaging/handling costs for major national retail customers and direct online sales
• Labour and Resource Utilization Modeling
  Quantification of labour efficiencies and overall utilization across all production and support activities
• Constraint-Based Planning
  Identification of process bottlenecks and quantification of the impacts of product waste and scrap on capacity and cost
• Data Quality Awareness
  Demonstrated the critical importance of production floor data quality for accurate operational planning and costing decisions

Quantified Business Benefits

Completed in ~3 months the CBP-DTO delivered practical, measurable improvements for Made with Local’s operations and leadership. Benefits included: 

   Operational Efficiency

• Improved visibility into production floor performance and resource utilization
• Identification of process bottlenecks and waste impacts as targets for continuous improvement

   Decision Quality

• Accurate, customer-specific cost understanding to support pricing and margin improvement decisions
• Data-driven foundation to evaluate new product lines and future capacity scaling decisions

   Return on Investment

• The Made with Local COO considered the ROI for this pilot effort to be very positive; citing meaningful improvements in operational insight and costing accuracy as the key outcomes.

Implementation Timeline: ~ 3 months to full facility DTO

Made with Local’s DTO implementation was funded through the NGen DTO Adoption Program, supporting Canada’s Advanced Manufacturing initiative. The project engaged the company’s operational leadership and demonstrated that DTO adoption is accessible and highly valuable even for smaller food manufacturers navigating rapid growth.