Silver Bay Seafoods – Solving Project Management Challenges of Multi-Location Large-Scale Operations

Started in 2007, Silver Bay Seafood is an integrated processor of frozen, salmon, herring, and squid products for domestic and export markets. Today, Silver Bay is one of the largest seafood companies in Alaska, operating six domestic processing facilities throughout Alaska and the West Coast of North America.

Project management challenges of multi-location large-scale operations

One of the organization’s biggest challenges in its Capital Expenditure Project policy was data management and integrity. Most of the project planning and request flow took place on multiple spreadsheets. Project documents and data needed to be collected and processed in a standardized manner so it was easily accessible for information or review. Without a centralized data source for project submission, there was a lack of transparency and cross-departmental collaboration.

Budget management would end as soon as a project would be assigned financial resources. It was a challenge to stay within budget and be able to foresee potential issues and risks.

Piecing together issued POs and allocating them to the project was being done manually. End-of-the-year project reviews consisted of endless searching for cost/savings items within the project, which used more time and resources to impact the overall efficiency. The management identified the need to do away with outdated methods of internal communication and project reporting.

The other big hurdle in the way of improving efficiency across departments was the lack of a standardized project approval process. Managers and teams needed a unified place to draft new project requests, send them for approval, and create new project sites. The senior management needed the same to approve the relevant project requests and address accountable teams on those projects. A new project request management system had to be in place in order to optimize the project pipeline and the resources.

Seeking a centralized project management solution for higher visibility and control

Silver Bay facilities needed to establish a centralized project data source and improve project visibility in order to improve their Capital Expenditure project request policy. They needed unique business process flows to standardize their business and operations processes across locations and departments. They were ready for a system to successfully capture all project requests in a single database, with the multistep approval process. The Senior management and project owners wanted to increase accountability and risk analysis to successfully predict the potential risks or issues that might arise during the course of the projects. There was a clear need for a centralized solution that would help their project teams across several locations to manage projects in a streamlined manner and also collaborate seamlessly. The senior management was looking for a solution that would be easy to deploy and that would also give them immediate visibility and control over their multiple project portfolios.