Sponsored Article by Hexagon
In food manufacturing, every second counts. For Nortera, North America’s leading processor of canned and frozen vegetables, lagging data and siloed systems weren’t just operational headaches; they risked disrupting production during the most critical times of the year. The solution? A real-time, unified approach to asset management.
The modern manufacturing challenge
As consumer demand accelerates, food manufacturers, like Nortera, face intensifying pressure to produce more, faster. With operations tied to unpredictable seasonal cycles, delays in procurement or maintenance could mean missed delivery windows or compromised product quality. To stay ahead, Nortera needed more than just incremental improvements, it needed end-to-end visibility across its entire asset infrastructure.
Legacy hurdles: Siloed data and disconnected systems
Before implementing a unified approach to asset management, Nortera’s 13 facilities operated as independent entities. Each relied on its own legacy systems for tracking maintenance, inventory, and procurement. This resulted in a lack of standardization and limited visibility into what was happening across all its sites. Teams weren’t able to share information easily, source spare parts, or align on preventive maintenance. Critical insights were trapped in spreadsheets or in the minds of longtime employees.
Turning the corner with HxGN EAM
To modernize its operations, Nortera partnered with Stratum Consulting (now part of Total Resource Management) to implement HxGN EAM, Hexagon’s enterprise asset management solution. The solution delivered:
- Mobile-first functionality for real-time updates on the floor or in the field
- Cloud-based scalability that unified all 13 sites
- Integration with Coupa, a cloud-based platform for AI-driven total spend management and supply chain optimization, to streamline procurement
- Support for multiple currencies and languages to accommodate diverse teams
Big gains with live insights
“Due to HxGN EAM’s support for multiple currencies and languages, our organization has successfully integrated purchasing and inventory data across multiple regions. The centralized access to storeroom information within a single application has proven invaluable, enabling us to identify equivalent spare parts at other facilities and thereby avoid significant operational downtime caused by supply chain disruptions,” said John Chester, Business Solutions Manager, Information Technology at Nortera.
With HxGN EAM in place, Nortera gained full visibility into assets and parts across its entire network. Teams could now:
- Locate and share spare parts across plants to avoid procurement delays
- Proactively manage maintenance, shifting from reactive to preventive workflows
- Make faster, data-driven decisions, especially during harvest peaks
This level of insight enabled better planning, reduced equipment downtime, and improved plant throughput.
Culture shift: Empowering teams with data
Perhaps the most powerful outcome wasn’t technical but cultural. Teams were no longer working in isolation. With shared access to real-time data, collaboration flourished. Plant managers, maintenance leads, and procurement specialists all spoke the same language of data. Mobile access gives field teams the agility to respond on the fly, while leadership has confidence in the numbers guiding each decision.
Downtime dropped, productivity soared, and teams felt equipped to meet growing demands without burning out.
“Nortera is leveraging HxGN EAM’s best-of-breed functionality and a strategic enterprisewide reliability approach to transform Asset Lifecycle Management across multiple facilities – driving consistent standards and operational excellence in planning, execution, and reliability and Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) optimization.” – Peyton Griggers, Executive Industry Consultant.
Real-time insights don’t just boost efficiency; they unlock a more resilient, empowered operation.
Read the full case study to discover how HxGN EAM brought fresh thinking and real-time efficiency to Nortera’s operations.
About the author
Nicole Lane is a Senior Account Executive for Consumer Goods & Food and Beverage at Hexagon. She began her career in the oil and gas industry, working in laboratories and quality control — giving her firsthand experience with the pace, pressure, and precision required to keep operations running smoothly. Since joining Hexagon, she’s grown from SDR to Enterprise AE, working across nearly every major industry and seeing how technology can make complex work simpler and smarter. Today, her focus is on helping the people who feed the world do it more efficiently, safely, and sustainably through connected data and resilient operations.
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