Ben Horsbrugh, Director of Quality Management for the Greenyard Fresh Group, explains why the integration between our Greenlight Supplier Management software and GLOBALG.A.P. has been such a benefit for their business.

“In our worldwide network of depots, Greenyard Fresh companies move huge volumes of fruit and vegetables every day. For every palette and box we move, we have to have full control of the traceability, from field to fork.

“Connecting and tracking this traceability data is an extremely challenging process, which is almost impossible without the use of specialised IT systems.

“The Greenlight Supplier Management tool from Muddy Boots is one of the key programmes we use to gather, monitor and manage the due diligence data and documentation from our global supply base. We’re not just talking about GLOBALG.A.P. (GG) certificates, we’re talking about quality agreements, traceability data, pesticide lists, residue reports and a wide range of other information which we need on a daily basis in order to comply with our customer requirements.

“One of the great things about the cooperation between Muddy Boots, GLOBALG.A.P. and Univeg is that the integration of these systems has resulted in massive time savings for our business.

“The GLOBALG.A.P. database and Muddy Boots database communicate with each other and ensure that all GLOBALG.A.P. data is up-to-date. This has a huge advantage for our business - we used to be uploading JPEGs and PDFs of all the GLOBALG.A.P. certificates we were receiving. Now, all we need to do in Greenlight Supplier Approval is enter the GLOBALG.A.P. number and everything else is completed automatically by the system. This means we don’t have to worry about files being out of date or certificates being invalid, because the system informs us when this is happening.

"Quality Management nowadays is not just about having a great tool like the GLOBALG.A.P. database or Muddy Boots’ Greenlight Supplier Management. It’s about getting companies and systems to talk to each other. If we are going to manage all this data on a global scale, keep it up-to-date and save time and resources in the process, we need intelligent systems and we need intelligent people who work together to ensure that we are all operating in the most efficient way possible".