Time and resource waste

When discussing waste in the industry, the first considerations rightly are on food waste and loss, however, there are other losses businesses can recuperate, such as time for resources which is often limited or access to data that cannot be collated without digital systems.

In today’s world of complex global supply chains, businesses are looking to seamlessly integrate, grow and develop business functions to effectively compete in a dynamic economy. Moving from a pre-digital era and digitising your supply chain and quality management practices is key to mitigating areas of waste.

Although standards of food safety have continuously improved to ensure the food we eat is safe, additional challenges such as the desire for sustainable sourcing and the way the industry accesses and shares this information has fallen behind many sectors. However, most companies do recognise that more transparency is needed within their supply chain than the traditional tier-one supplier transparency - which is no longer fit for purpose.

Efficient due diligence

A collaborative cloud-based platform allows all product and due diligence information to be held in a centralised and secure location, which a team can easily access, search and share. Suppliers can be invited to upload and manage their compliance documentation, reducing the administrative burden on internal teams.

Paper-based or excel spreadsheets with no system integration are not only time consuming and labour intensive to produce and maintain, but they are also difficult to share collaboratively which means the information is often out of date as soon as it is saved.

Instantly available data empowers everyone in your business to make timely, informed business decisions and identify areas of risk at the touch of a button.

Targeted risk management 

Digitised data capture gives you unparalleled visualisation of your supply chain. This is particularly important for confirming the country of origin and automatically validating certification status throughout the chain back to the source. Enabling you to understand risks not only of your direct suppliers but your indirect supply chains as well.

This comprehensive view of your supply chain enables the adoption of a targeted and dynamic approach to risk. Ensuring that the knowledge and expertise of your business are invested into the critical areas of the supply chain.

Modernising inspection

Digitising your food safety and quality management practices by capturing product quality, process, facility and safety checks into a cloud-based solution gives you the ability to generate real-time reports and tiered escalations. Where corrective actions are needed stakeholders are notified immediately, allowing an expedited response across your operation and supply chains.

A digitised approach will also give you access to reporting which in turn enables you to benchmark and profile product, site, supplier and people performance, helping you to reduce waste and optimise the efficiency of your operations.

Accuracy is key and the repetitive nature of looking at large amounts of data sets means that you can get “data blind” very easily, leading to inaccuracies. Having a structured system will help with error proofing, making fewer errors because of a systematic flow of data and information, highlighting blind spots you may have not known you had.

Checks by exception is another area that businesses can look to recuperate resource, many product quality checks are wasted because users are checking product that has not been subjected to any risk factors. Risk-based checking allows for intelligence-led checks focused on products with know risk. 

Time-saving in action – Worldwide Fruit

We have been providing cloud-based solutions to our customers for many years, helping them to manage their supply chains to increase the capacity of internal teams and improve supplier relationships with a systemised and automated process.

Worldwide Fruit are a great example of reinvesting time through a digitised solution –

Willie Wood, Head of Technical at Worldwide Fruit explains ‘We have seen the biggest difference in the capacity it has created within the team, allowing us to not just approve suppliers in the process but spend more time on our monthly quality meetings, which is where we review supplier performance. We can now have greater engagement and build improved dialogues which feed into our end of season reviews of supplier scorecards.’

References - Supply Chain Quality Management | IntechOpen; Can the digitalization of the supply chain reduce global food waste? - Packaging Europe