Founded in 1932, Chicago-based Newly Weds Foods manufactures ingredients and seasoning systems for restaurants and food-processing companies worldwide. With a global network of manufacturing, service, and research and development (R&D) facilities, the privately held company serves customers in more than 68 countries. Its highly diverse clientele includes businesses ranging from retail stores to mom-and-pop eateries to large national restaurant chains.

1. IBM Software
SmartCloud
Case Study
Newly Weds Foods boosts
customer service with
cloud collaboration
IBM SmartCloud Engage service helps deliver
culinary excellence to customers across time zones
Overview
The need
As Newly Weds Foods expanded beyond
US borders and acquired international
facilities, distance and time zones
hampered communication among
increasingly diverse professional staffs.
The solution
The company adopted the
IBM® SmartCloud™ Engage social
business cloud collaboration service to
connect chefs, R&D staff and IT profes-
sionals with their counterparts worldwide
in a cloud-based environment.
The benefit
Communication response times are
now hours instead of days. Newly Weds
Foods also saves almost a week per
month in travel time, and airfare and
accommodation expenses dropped by
up to 10 percent.
Founded in 1932, Chicago-based Newly Weds Foods manufactures
ingredients and seasoning systems for restaurants and food-processing
companies worldwide. With a global network of manufacturing, service,
and research and development (R&D) facilities, the privately held
company serves customers in more than 68 countries. Its highly diverse
clientele includes businesses ranging from retail stores to mom-and-pop
eateries to large national restaurant chains.
Barriers to serving customers efficiently
Since the 1980s, when Newly Weds Foods first established a presence in
Europe, the pace of expansion continued to pick up speed with entry into
new global markets and acquisition of international labs. Although good
for business, rapid growth hampered communications among chefs and
with R&D staff members. When Newly Weds Foods was smaller, with
fewer recipes and employees, its chefs were able to share customer and
culinary information using a combination of email, teleconferences, faxes
and in-person meetings. However, as offices opened in multiple time
zones and additional chefs and thousands of new customers came into
the picture, the company needed more intelligent and streamlined ways
to communicate.
When different teams of international chefs looked at a customer’s needs,
for example, it was usually obvious there were gaps the teams needed to
address. However, with slow, inadequate communications, teams often
ended up doing similar work in isolation, wasting time and squandering
opportunities. “We were dealing with many of the same clients worldwide
but in different ways with different product lines. We needed to collabo-
rate more effectively between countries for a more consistent and tar-
geted approach to each client,” says Abe White, director of culinary
development at Newly Weds Foods.

2. 2
Case Study
IBM Software
SmartCloud
“Being able to connect our
culinary chefs in the
cloud is invaluable when
talking about customer
service. With access to
information that might
otherwise not be readily
available, they can make
better decisions and
answer client questions
more quickly.”
—Bob Brindza, Service-oriented Architecture
(SOA) Business Analyst, Newly Weds Foods
The company also found it difficult for the IT department to deploy
new technology and services to employees in a timely fashion. The chal-
lenges again centered on distances and time zone differences, which
impeded efficiently deploying new applications and services to the user
base. Newly Weds Foods needed an effective solution to bring together
its geographically dispersed IT resources without incurring the capital
expense and hiring staff to run an in-house solution.
With 27 plants worldwide, including the Philippines, China and
Thailand, moving to the cloud made perfect sense. But using a free
service was not an option because much of the information the company
shared was proprietary and often related to specific customer recipes.
Newly Weds Foods sought a reliable, security-rich cloud solution to
address its business communications and IT deployment challenges.
Moving to a more social business
Newly Weds Foods chose the IBM SmartCloud Engage social business
cloud collaboration service to help enable staff members to share
information and ideas quickly and easily regardless of time or location.
Culinary team members use the Profiles function to find and collaborate
with chefs around the world. They employ Communities and Files
capabilities to share information for everything from recipes to demos.
They also use web meetings to share presentations and initiate discussions
with colleagues and customers. “Using these tools is really helping
Newly Weds Foods become more of a social business, connecting our
many resources across the globe in an effort to bring better products to
our customers,” says White.
In particular, chefs like the Activities portion of the SmartCloud Engage
functionality. It helps keep them apprised of project progress and can
enable them to request timely assistance from other chefs.
There is now timely collaboration among chefs and between culinary
and R&D staff members. They share trend data and information about
current market offerings to help ensure that Newly Weds Foods pursues
the most profitable opportunities and avoids redundant effort. With
global access to project information, everyone benefits from what others
have already accomplished. Because of all these collaboration capabilities,
the SmartCloud Engage service helps speeds time to market of new and
enhanced products and services.

3. 3
Case Study
IBM Software
SmartCloud
Solution components
Software
●●
IBM® SmartCloud™ Engage
A social business...
Embraces networks of people to create
business value and exhibits three
underlying tenets. It is engaged, trans-
parent and nimble.
Engaged
●●
Improves creativity by helping
professional staff members find
and collaborate with experts and
colleagues around the world
Transparent
●●
Increases productivity by keeping
chefs and IT team members up to
date on project progress and
helping enable timely requests for
peer assistance
Nimble
●●
Increases speed to market by
accelerating staff response to
changing culinary trends and
customer inquiries
Entry point
●●
Deepens customer relationships
Timely information sharing and technology
deployment
Productivity and process improvements are just as significant among IT
teams. An operations staff member, for example, can identify a problem
with a particular type of software, create a patch and share it immediately
with the rest of the IT community. From there, an IT director can assign
operations people to bring down affected systems at the least disruptive
time for each location and apply the patch.
The Newly Weds Foods IT department also uses the SmartCloud
Engage service to speed deployment of new technology. “We are encour-
aging all of our IT members to create extensive profiles—their knowl-
edge, their schooling, their background, some of the projects they’ve
worked on,” says Bob Brindza, SOA business analyst at Newly Weds
Foods. “Then, when I am looking to adopt a technology tool or develop
a new application, I can find out quickly who in our organization has the
needed experience.”
Before adopting the SmartCloud Engage service, Newly Weds Foods
IT directors spent significant time traveling to coordinate technology
projects. Expenses were high and decision makers had to wait for the
information they needed. When deploying technology, IT directors
depended on a shared network drive to circulate documents or database
files. There was a delay between when files were placed on the network
and when they were picked up. To make matters worse, the European
and Asia-Pacific offices had no access to the network infrastructure.
“The director of IT responsible for these offices was traveling constantly,”
says Brindza. “With the SmartCloud Engage solution, he can now collab-
orate on projects remotely from his offices up in Canada without having
to jump on a plane.” For example, the IT director can open up a live
meeting instantly in the SmartCloud Engage environment and share
project information. Based on the results of planned and ad hoc meetings,
he can update and assign tasks using the Activities functionality.
Superior service at lower cost
The SmartCloud Engage social business cloud service is proving
highly cost-effective. There was no need to invest in an infrastructure,
it requires minimal maintenance, and the business realizes nontechnical
benefits daily.
Newly Weds Foods saves between four and five business days of traveling
per month and cut airfare costs by 10 percent. At the same time, the
business reduced communication response time between chefs and IT
personnel worldwide from days to hours. Working in different time zones
is no longer a barrier to productivity, and needed information is available
anytime from anywhere.

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The company’s response to customers also improved significantly.
The SmartCloud Engage guest account model provides no-cost access
to suppliers and customers so they can collaborate more easily. Chefs
hold impromptu web meetings to share recipes and discuss ideas for
new region-appropriate sauces, batters, breading, seasonings and menus.
With the SmartCloud Engage service, Newly Weds Foods brings global
ideas to domestic marketplaces, serving customers worldwide with more
consistent, higher-quality products and services.
For more information
To learn more about IBM SmartCloud for Social Business service
offerings, contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business
Partner, or visit the following website: ibmcloud.com/social
To learn more about how Newly Weds Foods is becoming a social
business, watch the video: http://youtu.be/mSi0HJzPmq0
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April 2012
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