Skip to Main Content
case study

Increasing competitive advantage through PLM

Use of comprehensive product data management tools helps Daesang increase innovation and significantly reduce time and costs

Increasing competitive advantage through PLM

Daesang

Daesang Corporation, a biotechnology specialist, produces a variety of food lines, including Sunchang redpepper paste, Gamchimi, Matna and Matsunsang condiments, as well as a variety of fish sauces, flavors, western cuisine, frozen foods, coffee, healthy offerings and meatprocessed fare.

http://www.edaesang.com
Headquarters:
Seoul
Products:
Teamcenter
Industry Sector:
Consumer products & retail

Share

Teamcenter from Siemens Digital Industries Software has enabled us to standardize our work, and has allowed us to follow business processes that enable us to maintain overall consistency. Greatly improved data management, sharing and collaboration made possible using Teamcenter has not only helped us to greatly enhance project coordination – a huge benefit alone – it has also resulted in our achieving a higher level of competitiveness and stronger presence in the market.
Ho Jung Kim, Manager
Daesang

Korea’s leading general foods company

Established in 1956, Daesang has grown into one of the world’s top 3 professional fermentation companies and one of Korea’s best general foods providers. In 1962, it became the first Korean company to successfully develop production processes for glutamate acids through fermentation technology, effectively opening the first chapter of Korea’s biotechnology industry. Since then, the company has made its reputation as a globally competitive biotechnology fermentation company, developing the technologies to produce approximately 20 kinds of amino acids, including MSG, L-Phenylalanine and L-Glutamine, as well as nucleic acids.

With steadily growing sales, Daesang employs about 3,500 people. Chungjungwon, Korea’s leading general foods brand, is at the center of Daesang’s business success. Other prominent products include Sunchang red-pepper paste, Gamchimi, Matna and Matsunsang condiments, as well as a variety of fish sauces, flavors, western cuisine, frozen foods, coffee, healthy lines and meatprocessed fare.

Korea’s leading general foods company

Extensive data and document management challenges

Like many general foods companies, Daesang produces hundreds of different kinds of products, including all sorts of foods and food ingredients. Thus, it manages an extensive range of documents for each product and its mass production. Each division, which includes sales, marketing, research, quality assurance and production, manages its own products; however, errors were increasingly entering into each organization’s processes, especially in projects requiring extensive collaboration.

In an effort to address its product data management (PDM) and collaboration challenges, the company developed several in-house systems. Their effectiveness was short-lived, with projects increasingly involving more complex data manipulation as well as well-orchestrated teamwork. “The need for a standardized software solution to address our evergrowing data and document requirements became obvious,” says Ho Jung Kim, a manager at Daesang. “Moreover, we felt we could gain a competitive advantage by driving our innovation process through advanced product lifecycle management (PLM) software.”

PLM-driven innovation

When Daesang introduced PLM to drive its product development innovation, it also did so across business units, so that all data generated from product development and mass production processes was integrated. Information could now be easily shared not just within a business unit, but also across the entire company.

To that end, the company chose key personnel from relevant departments to form its task force team (TFT), which was responsible for assessing, selecting and implementing the new technology. After a thorough evaluation process involving a number of leading PLM companies, TFT selected Teamcenter® software from Siemens Digital Industries Software. TFT felt that the strong, fundamental features of Teamcenter combined with the extensive implementation experience of Siemens Digital Industries Software offered the best solution to not only meet its goals, but to do so quickly.

Key link between product data management system and project management system

Daesang used the openness of Teamcenter to integrate its own project management system into the PLM environment to realize a transparent and effective product development process.

It took about five months to build the entire PLM-based solution. High-priority features, identified through gap analysis and a research and development (R&D) needs assessment, were addressed first. “One of the key factors to our fast and highly successful PLM deployment was management’s company-wide commitment to making it happen,” says Kim. “Their positive attitude was supported by a vision of ‘what could be,’ ultimately instilling confidence throughout the organization. People really got behind the system, whereas it’s not uncommon in such implementations to experience significant resistance to change.”

Today, Daesang’s product data management system and project management system are fully integrated, enabling single-source access to the organization’s entire product development knowledge base.

Key link between product data management system and project management system

Achievements

Daesang’s fully integrated and highly transparent product development environment has resulted in the company achieving a mastery over its data. The result is highly productive collaboration between its divisions and a significant reduction in the time required to develop products. “With such clear product development processes, personal productivity is at an all-time high,” says Kim. “Moreover, individuals are now more fully leveraging their own potential.”

Kim notes that much of the success is the result of overall harmony across business units, made possible by standardized processes enterprise-wide: “Effectively shared data dramatically improved project coordination. Another huge advantage of Teamcenter is our ability to so easily leverage previously launched products. When we create products similar to those already produced, we can do so quickly by immediately retrieving relevant information, which greatly reduces product development time and expense.” He adds, “It isn’t just a time and money advantage; we are gaining a quality edge, with significantly reduced failure rates appearing to demonstrate a real benefit as well.”

Kim summarizes, “Teamcenter from Siemens Digital Industries Software has enabled us to standardize our work, and has allowed us to follow business processes that enable us to maintain overall consistency. Greatly improved data management, sharing and collaboration made possible using Teamcenter has not only helped us to greatly enhance project coordination – a huge benefit alone – it has also resulted in our achieving a higher level of competitiveness and stronger presence in the market.”

Next steps

Daesang plans to extend its use of PLM. The company plans to use Teamcenter to engage collaboratively with other enterprises. It also plans to link work results through PLM and fully extend its use company-wide. This PLM-enabled product development innovation will greatly help Daesang to grow into a world-class general foods company down the road.