Creative Occasions differentiates its products with customized decorations. Unfortunately, this area of production is hard, if not impossible, to automate. As
a result, the company stations a series of decorators along a conveyor line to customize each cake.

When Creative Occasions started producing cakes, it hired several former in-store bakery cake decorators to handle its cake decoration.

After a short time on the

line, Crow realized that these decorators were accustomed to producing 10 to 15 cakes a day, a far cry from the company's output of 12,000 a day. Plus, these decorators were conditioned to complete an entire cake, and did not adjust well to the assembly line nature of the company's production system.

As a result, the company switched gears and employed non-decorators, then trained them to become decorators. These employees quickly picked up decorating, and were conditioned to work on a decorating assembly line.

The company arms these decorators with a combination of Unifiller Deco-Mates and piping bags. The Deco-Mates provide Creative Occasions' employees with an ergonomically-correct decorating tool that assists with cake borders and decorated cake tops.