Guangzhou Restaurant Group Transforms Cantonese Cuisine with Centric PLM

Capturing the Minds of Consumers

“Likoufu has many kinds of product but the pace of development of various products is difficult to control. With the successful implementation of PLM, Likuofu will effectively accumulate and compare data, improve overall management ability, shorten the distance between products and consumers and pay particular attention to capturing the minds of new generations of consumers, so as to turn old brands into brand assets.”

Tang Wensheng, Chief Information Officer, and Huang Dayao, Business Director of Guangzhou Restaurant Group, say, “In the early years of R&D, consumers had little influence on the products that were made and launched to market. Today, R&D has switched to involving consumer input. Because of this, feedback from R&D on market demand needs to be faster, more accurate and agile.”

Guangzhou Restaurant’s Likoufu brand decided to digitalize operations by implementing Centric Food and Beverage PLM. The primary goal of the PLM project was to build a digital product lifecycle management platform covering each stage from consumer demand to product launch, to streamline R&D and increase business efficiency.”

Time-Honored Cantonese Dim Sum

Founded in 1935, Guangzhou Restaurant is well-respected as the leader in Cantonese cuisine. The Guangzhou Restaurant Group was established in 1991 and is recognized as one of China’s top ten food and beverage companies. Likoufu Food Co. Ltd., is a large-scale modern food production enterprise under Guangzhou Restaurant Group that produces hundreds of food items across eight product lines for the Likoufu brand.

A New Digital Management Paradigm

With the increasing adoption of PLM across different consumer goods verticals in recent years, the food industry has also turned its attention towards the benefits that these solutions offer. One reason is that enterprises aim to amass R&D knowledge and achieve structured data management through PLM due to the high level of reuse of food product R&D data like ingredients, recipes, allergens, etc. Businesses also want to improve R&D capabilities to respond to market competition with stronger, and faster, product innovation.

In the past, Likoufu conducted its R&D project management both online and offline, and experienced issues with process control, data utilization and resource integration. Knowing that PLM provides a new digital management paradigm for food enterprises, Likoufu began their PLM selection journey. Deeply impressed by Centric Software’s professional industry insights and rich project experience, Likoufu carefully considered its goals and scope for the PLM project, and decided to implement Centric Food and Beverage PLM.

User-Driven Implementation of PLM

Likoufu kicked off the implementation of Centric Food and Beverage PLM in September 2021, aiming to establish an information-based platform that covers the entire product lifecycle, including market strategy, product requirements, product planning, product development and product releases. With a unified work platform, Likuofu will be able to effectively control the R&D process, disseminate product knowledge, improve communication and collaboration across teams and workflows and release new products faster.

Following a phase-based approach to implementation, the first phase was completed in just three months and focused on improving R&D coordination, visibility and project management. Simultaneously, a centralized digital platform has been established at management, business and system levels to enhance the efficiency of coordinated R&D efforts.

Huang Dayao, Business Director of Guangzhou Restaurant Group’s Technical Center, says, “Thanks to close collaboration between the Guangzhou Restaurant R&D Center and the Centric Software team, the PLM project has achieved the fastest and most user-driven implementation among all IT projects ever carried out by Guangzhou Restaurant Group.”

PLM Empowers Consumer-Driven R&D & Brand Building

Rapid development of the internet and the emergence of countless digital technologies have resulted in the evolution of business logic from focusing on empirical data to agile, digitalized R&D that responds to emerging trends. In order to stay close to consumer trends, Likoufu has decided to collaborate with Centric PLM™ to understand the mindset of next-generation customers and build robust branding for today’s market.

“Today’s launch marks a solid step forward for our entire R&D team in moving away from the previous offline, manual mode to the digital mode,” explains Tang Wensheng, CIO of Guangzhou Restaurant Group’s Technical Center.

Feng Deyue, Food Safety Director of Guangzhou Restaurant Groups Food Safety Office adds,

Much Anticipated Digital Transformation

The digital transformation of an enterprise usually involves the “standardization, informatization and digitalization” stages. Centric PLM was implemented over the course of three months, during which time Likoufu completed the first two steps, namely standardization and informatization to move away from a paper and spreadsheet based approach. Moving forward, the company will expand its scope of Centric PLM to achieve closed-loop digitization of its businesses.

Lv Yizhong, Deputy General Manager of Guangzhou Restaurant Likoufu says, “PLM is an excellent platform that offers a promising future if it is used well. We now have a unified digital platform that automatically and continuously aggregates valuable human and material resources, which will help us to convert a time-honored brand into an asset.”

Mr. Lv concludes, “I have a lot of expectations for the extended application of PLM in the future. The scalability of Centric PLM will be leveraged to incorporate more business links for closed-loop management, including raw materials, formulas, packaging and R&D models with consumer input. The Guangzhou Restaurant Group looks forward to ushering in the era of comprehensive digital R&D.”