How Jetson Transformed Labor Planning at Stella and Chewy's

Overview of the Client Company and Their Manufacturing Profile

Stella & Chewy’s is a manufacturer of premium pet food products, using raw and natural ingredients to help pets thrive. Since 2019, they have seen double digit growth and repeatedly rank among the Top Workplaces in Wisconsin.

The Challenge

Growing demand for responsibly sourced, natural pet food products led Stella & Chewy’s to expand their manufacturing facility in Oak Creek in 2022. As operations grew more complex and skilled capacity needs grew, managers struggled to keep track of live floor variables and get a clear picture of future capacity requirements.

“Our planning process was chaos and managed in spreadsheets and meetings where we didn’t have a point of reference to understand the basics of how many people we needed to meet our production plan versus how many people we had, accounting for things like turnover and call-outs” reflects Michael Carter, VP of Manufacturing.

This method was error prone and a drain on managers’ time but also made it difficult to execute accurate production cost and margin control. Stella & Chewy’s Leadership Team decided they needed an automated and centralized solution that would help scale their capacity approach to meet demand while driving long-term manufacturing cost reduction.​​

The Solution: Deploying a Configurable Manufacturing Intelligence Platform

Stella & Chewy’s partnered with Jetson to eliminate data crunching and guesswork surrounding their manual spreadsheet planning process. They needed a system that could connect schedules, floor clock data, sales forecasts, and other drivers of capacity demand in one place. The solution needed to be tailored and configurable to Stella & Chewy’s manufacturing process where work is staged and requires specialized training and different skill levels to perform. The solution also needed to be intuitive and easy for Operations and plant leadership to use for daily capacity allocation and weekly headcount choices.

Results

Since teaming up with Jetson, Stella & Chewy’s have given time back to managers and achieved bottom line benefits with an automated and centralized labor forecasting and operational capacity approach. “We’ve come a long way from spreadsheets and guesswork to trusting a tool that has automation, actuals, historicals, and all our business rules built in” says Carter, VP of Manufacturing.

Here are some ways Stella & Chewy’s have unlocked production efficiency and cost control in their operation:

Generated Precise Headcount and Capacity Needs for Each Line

Jetson took the guesswork out of how many hours, shifts, and lines to run, making it easy for Stella & Chewy’s to move from static headcount planning to a dynamic process where needs automatically update with their sales forecast and production plan. “We’re also able to view and manage inputs like availability and overtime expectations that feed our plan,” says Carter.

Gained Real-Time Production Monitoring into Future Capacity Needs

Jetson’s long range planning capabilities make it easy for managers to execute precise labor forecasting and know where to deploy skills. “It’s really the source of truth for what our current floor levels are and what our future capacity needs look like so we can ramp up or down to meet demand” reflects Carlo Cervantes, HRBP.

Improved Mid-Shift Production Efficiency and Deployment Decisions

With visibility to scheduled headcount and hours as well as real-time floor data, Operations Leaders could identify over and under capacity shifts and close coverage gaps 10x faster while executing automated overtime tracking and management.

Plan vs Actual and Operational Variance Reporting  

Planning assumptions improve weekly with easy budget vs actual reporting of floor hours and spend along with tools to manage drivers of variance like overtime. “Looking at historical trends compared with what we anticipated helps us see operational patterns so that we can run a cleaner variance analysis report,” reflects Cervantes.

Streamlined Manufacturing Cost Reduction and Budgeting

Jetson has helped Stella & Chewy’s reduce time spent on budgeting from days to minutes, with automated spend tracking and projections to align with ongoing production and capacity planning software metrics. “Typically budgeting required three days of crawling through spreadsheets but now with Jetson as a starting point, we’re able to arrive at a headcount planning framework that Finance and Operations agree on within 1-hour” says Carter.

Kept Plant Leadership Aligned with Real-Time Operational Reporting

With floor planning centralized and automated, Stella & Chewy’s has more time to focus on output and award-winning pet food products. “Jetson is a one-stop shop that’s helped us streamline not just headcount planning but production forecasting and budgeting via a unified manufacturing kpi dashboard,” says Cervantes.

Automated tracking of Actuals against Plan  

With floor planning centralized and automated to meet unique operational needs, Stella & Chewy’s has more time to focus on expanding output and scaling lines. “Jetson is a one-stop shop that’s helped us streamline job costing software for manufacturing inputs, forecasting, and budgeting in one place,” says Cervantes.

“We’ve come a long way from spreadsheets and guesswork to trusting a tool that has automation, actuals, historicals, and all our business rules built in” says Carter, VP of Manufacturing.

How Manufacturing Intelligence Software Transforms Plant Operations

To understand why this case study is so impactful, it is necessary to examine how archaic spreadsheets damage high-growth food operations. Traditional factory models separate the production calendar from the ledger. When a company relies on manual data transmission across siloed departments, high variance appears immediately.

For a scaling plant like Stella & Chewy’s, monitoring compliance, specialized packaging machinery setups, and blending rooms requires highly rigid, skill-mapped configurations. If a line is incorrectly staffed, production efficiency drops and severe bottlenecks occur.

Implementing modern manufacturing analytics software acts as an intelligent operating layer. It bridges the gap between active ERP demand and floor execution, delivering real-time production monitoring and dashboards that show supervisors exactly who is available, certified, and deployed. This visibility prevents expensive lines from running below capacity before a single machine spins up.

Combating Machine Downtime and Variance with Intelligent Production Monitoring

The modern food manufacturing software landscape faces severe floor challenges, with unpredictable shift call-outs and volatile schedules altering daily output metrics. When frontline lines are short-staffed unexpectedly, a traditional supervisor spends the first two hours of their morning frantically firefighting. This reactive posture stalls production lines, triggers bad variance, and destroys profit margins.

Jetson's predictive manufacturing intelligence software transforms this dynamic from reactive scrambling to proactive prevention. By analyzing historical performance trends and localized capacity constraints, the platform allows management teams to run a precise bottleneck analysis beforehand.

Supervisors can confidently adjust their active floor strategies and contingent plans weeks in advance. The system balances direct headcount expenses against flexible contingent spend, keeping the plant optimally sized to handle aggressive order spikes from major retail distributors without causing production bottleneck failures.

Maximizing Production Efficiency by Automating Cross-Departmental Variance Reporting

True production efficiency is impossible to maintain when accounting personnel and plant floor directors speak completely different data languages. While the plant operations team focuses on raw cases and throughput, the finance office looks strictly at weekly variance and margin leaks.

Jetson synthesizes these competing metrics into a single interface. When schedules change, the integrated platform updates the underlying capacity parameters instantly, calculating the precise impact on job costing software for manufacturing ledgers on the spot.

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This automated tracking prevents the costly over-staffing of light production days and stops unnecessary overtime spikes from eroding corporate profit margins. Frontline teams gain complete clarity, while finance leaders track actual costs against real-time production outcomes. This eliminates end-of-month budget shocks and delivers clean budget vs actual reporting across every tier of the enterprise.

Eliminating Production Bottlenecks through Real-Time Operational Reporting

Erratic shift changes and last-minute manual schedule adjustments create severe floor friction, leading to high operational variance and line delays. Jetson provides unprecedented floor stability by calculating complex multi-week labor forecasting needs well ahead of time.

This advanced notice transforms the frontline experience, ensuring that overtime allocation is managed fairly based on actual plant data and live throughput requirements. When an enterprise runs its facility through stable, organized, and highly visible real-time production monitoring, plant health improves naturally. This predictable environment directly drives capacity utilization gains and helps high-volume facilities meet their aggressive schedule attainment goals consistently.

The Strategic Future of Manufacturing Analytics and Intelligence Software

While this case study focuses on pet food production, the core principles of Jetson's manufacturing intelligence software scale across many complex operational environments. Any industrial ecosystem that balances varying demand against complex floor capacity can realize huge process improvements from these automated tools.

For instance, high-volume consumer packaged goods facilities must scale their line staffing rapidly to match sudden logistics waves. Similarly, large packaging manufacturing setups and multi-location distribution hubs must balance strict budget limits against localized capacity availability using specialized warehouse labor management protocols.

By feeding historical actuals, business rules, and real-time operational inputs into an automated engine, modern operations can safely ditch manual spreadsheets. This strategic upgrade gives teams the precise production and capacity planning software environment required to maximize their output, lower operating costs, and protect their bottom-line margins.