Microsoft Access - Project Profile for the Specification Management System

Sector: Consumer Goods
Industry: Confectioners
Revenue: $4.0 Billion

The Wrigley Company is a recognized leader in the confectionery field and the world's largest manufacturer and marketer of chewing gum. The company markets its world-famous brands in more than 180 countries. Three of these brands - Wrigley's Spearmint®, Juicy Fruit®, and Altoids® – have heritages stretching back more than a century. Other brands include Doublemint®, Life Savers®, Big Red®, Boomer®, Pim Pom®, Winterfresh®, Extra®, Freedent®, Hubba Bubba®, Orbit®, Excel®, Creme Savers®, Eclipse®, Airwaves®, Alpine®, Solano®, Sugus®, Cool Air®, and P.K.®.

Business Situation

The company has several divisions operating from its Global Innovation Center in Chicago on Goose Island including Quality, Research & Development, Packaging Innovation, and Global Engineering. These departments needed a solution to maintain a database of specifications. Packaging engineers routinely develop new specifications. It was important that these documents be stored for retrieval by production personnel and third-party vendors. Several departments were using an Excel-based solution that was lacking in functionality, versatility, and in ease-of-use.

Solution

Specification Management System

The Wrigley Company selected Access Programmers to develop a new customized solution that would help with the transition from its current Microsoft Excel application to an inter-department application to manage specifications. The customized Microsoft Access-based product enables engineers to build new specification documents based on a series of thirteen pre-defined templates. Each document begins in an experimental state and is then published once and finalized by the author. Production personnel can query the system based on a series of design parameters.