Lydia Hubbard, Head of Technical is pleased to report that Greenlight Supplier Approval from Muddy Boots Software is “enhancing the effective management of our supply chain” at revolutionary snack business Graze. 

Founded in 2007, Graze have a vision to become the number one health snack brand by using their technology and creativity to reinvent the way the food industry works and to compete with traditional FMCG snack companies. 

Ten years on and Graze have successfully expanded from the UK into the US, and increased their snack range to over 400 products with their own production facility. This coupled with their ability to get new products on sale within 24 hours, has resulted in an enviable growth in sales in UK & US markets. 

Until late 2017, managing the compliance and performance of an extensive global supply chain had been a manual process which whilst extremely valuable in helping to build strong supplier relationships, had also become time and resource intensive to do. Looking to improve business efficiencies and reduce administrative burden on internal teams, Graze decided to find a supplier management platform that would help them to achieve these goals. 

For Graze, the key requirements from a supplier management platform were that it needed to be easy to use, provide them with immediate visibility into the performance at all levels of their supply chain and ensure that the close relationships built from direct communication with their suppliers, would not be lost. After reviewing a number of options, Graze chose Greenlight Supplier Approval from Muddy Boots as the platform that met all their needs. 

The platform was originally launched for use by the Technical team for the management of specifications and supplier approval documentation. With system generated alerts notifying both the supplier and technical team of tasks that need completing or of impending documentation expiries, less resource is now required to manage this process. This has had the most significant impact on their business in that they are now able to immediately see the approval status of their entire supply chain. 

Adoption across the wider business has been an additional and surprising win for the company. Today both the Procurement and NPD teams are actively engaged and using Greenlight Supplier Approval to manage their own agendas and the scope of supplier management has also now been extended beyond ingredients to include packaging and service suppliers too. 

Summing up their experience of working with Muddy Boots, Lydia concludes that “we were initially apprehensive about the move as our current processes were working successfully, however now we can't imagine going back to how things were before! Greenlight Supplier Approval gives us the core structure to manage info - now we simply build on it.”