Nutra-Flo does all the manufacturing and processing for its protein and biotech products in the United States. To meet the increasing demand for its products, they must open new processing plants and improve existing ones. Their plants, predominantly automated, operate close to 365 days a year, 24/7. To ensure safety and efficiency, they periodically do what's called a "turn around" where they close the plant for 90 hours for equipment review, process review, maintenance, and cleaning to improve plant operations.

Nutra-Flo knew it needed a solution to help manage this complex project and keep their resource allocations and costs in check. In the past, they relied on Word documents, e-mail, and spreadsheets to share the massive amounts of information across all members of the team. This approach was becoming next to impossible. One shut down cost an extra US$150,000 due to delays and poor planning. That's when Nutra-Flo made the decision to purchase Genius Project 4 Domino, version 5, from Genius Inside.

Project4Domino let Nutra-Flo have one location to develop and store all project-related material: project plan with milestones, timelines and deliverables; resource allocation; project cost assessment and risk; and reports. All team members can access it and, almost more importantly, they can see how their work affects other team members and the project as a whole. Nutra-Flo never had such a complete look at their operations before. In the past, welders and electricians had been bumping into each other because they couldn't tell how their work affected the others!

Additionally, because Project4Domino was designed on Domino, it let Nutra-Flo use Notes clients or the Web to access data. According to Lohry, "I can replicate this project material in Genius to my Notes client on my laptop, which is incredibly valuable when traveling overseas on business or when using a slow Internet connection. Our project managers are able to use it by connecting via a wireless EVDO card.

"We also like the ease and low cost of deployment. I was able to set up the system on my own without any help from IT in an hour. That's pretty unusual. We quickly set it up for all department members. And, because it runs on our existing Domino mail servers, additional servers weren't required.

"We had been searching for project management solutions for several months and evaluated several. We even set up a controlled test of another Web solution, but to run it, we had to purchase a dedicated server, Oracle database software running on Linux, and the Oracle licenses. Plus we had to spend a lot of time configuring things to support single sign-on. It was expensive, time consuming, and complicated to set up. Genius' prices were reasonable and required no additional hardware or software investment."

Nutra-Flo recently ran another plant "turn-around" which went well, thanks to the Genius solution. The project ran smoothly, on-time, and on-budget.

Project4Domino is also coming in handy in a new initiative: Nutra-Flo is embarking on a joint development partnership with a Korean company to develop fermented soy products. According to Nutra-Flo, it will start by using Project4Domino in marketing and sales aspects of this partnership, and may expand into other areas.

Multiple uses

Nutra-Flo has expanded its use of Genius Project4Domino into two other areas: marketing and safety. Now, the director of worldwide marketing, in Minneapolis, can see what development plans the product teams have input and develop his launch and marketing plans remotely. The new joint venture project with the Korean biotech company involves complex marketing and advertising strategies and difficult export requirements. Nutra-Flo uses Genius Project4Domino to help digest all the information connected with this project and make sure that nothing critical is missed.

The safety department uses Project4Domino to manage multiple safety projects for several manufacturing plants. Safety program development, training, and compliance audits for existing facilities as well as for the new joint venture project are now in one place where team members can properly plan and manage them. Nutra-Flo plans to roll out Genius Project4Domino corporate wide by the end of 2007, starting with its management team.

According to Lohry, "We have been very happy with Genius Inside's responsiveness and support. They have been extremely helpful to us throughout our deployment. We feel this is a truly great solution for companies looking for collaborative, in depth, analytical project management tools."

Pros

• Collaborative software that supports business and process project management functions
• Very good support locally
• Helps to monitor capital expenditures
• Can use on laptop, desktop client or via Web (good for companies looking to share with external partners, consultants, suppliers, etc.)

• Foreign company was worried about support
• Has so many features, there is a lot to learn