Chainfood

Optimising your chain, step by step and cost effectively

You cannot design, build and check a chain down to the smallest details, because you would ultimately deny each chain and each company the ability to respond flexibly and quickly to its individual environment. Nevertheless, depending on its specific needs and ambitions, a chain demands a certain degree of coordination, from the source to the consumer. Accordingly, increasing amounts of information are being exchanged to achieve this.

Optimising your chain, step by step and cost effectively

You cannot design, build and check a chain down to the smallest details, because you would ultimately deny each chain and each company the ability to respond flexibly and quickly to its individual environment. Nevertheless, depending on its specific needs and ambitions, a chain demands a certain degree of coordination, from the source to the consumer. Accordingly, increasing amounts of information are being exchanged to achieve this.

What promises can you really make to your customers?

Formally recording quality requirements and certifying that processes are in line with them is an important instrument for quality management, particularly where chains have a lot of links and potential providers. Without guarantees that suppliers and their products and processes comply with specific requirements, companies can offer little promise to their own customers. But the complexity of audit management can increase quickly, particularly when tasks and aspects affect more than one company. The ChainPoint chain information management system makes sure that audit management remains controllable, both organisationally and in terms of cost.

ChainPoint supports companies in planning, preparing, performing and reporting on internal and external audits. Smart digital forms record audit findings; in the event of any observations, the corrective measures can be drawn up, allocated to owners and followed up using workflows. The ChainPoint Portal will keep you informed about the progress of the process, and user-friendly reports notify all authorised persons in the chain about the results of the audit.

ChainPoint audit management stands out for its flexibility: it can be set up easily to suit your requirements. Don't hesitate to contact us - we will be pleased to show you how audit management can work in your chain.

Chain collaboration offers the biggest opportunities

Any organisation aims individually for effective processes and many succeed in attaining a high level. But that gives no guarantee at all that everything will run smoothly between suppliers and customers. It is precisely in this situation that a great deal of potential lies in being able to cooperate effectively in the chain. ChainPoint is the digital platform that lets suppliers, customers and third parties collaborate on quality and risk management.

From design to solution
Discover the areas where collaborative improvements can be realised. Define the critical performance indicators, along with the data that is relevant for them, and improve collaborative processes. ChainPoint offers a number of functions to help, including:

• Online sharing of requirements, procedures, discrepancies and corrective action plans:
• Sharing product information and associated safety information;
• Audit management, including the use of flexible audit forms and audit reports;
• Warnings and reports about discrepancies, including initiating and monitoring corrective measures;
• An overview of how suppliers are performing on specific points and in general terms;
• Result analyses to estimate risks and assist decision-making about quality and purchasing;
• Complaints management;
• Integration with other IT systems, such as ERP, LIMS and Office;

From registering suppliers to conducting audits and implementing corrective measures, ChainPoint offers manufacturers, retailers and suppliers a platform for continuous improvement of quality, sustainability and safety. Additionally, ChainPoint reduces cost because:

• the risk-based inspection concept saves on the costs for audits and lab analyses;
• it is web-based and easily scalable, equally supporting both large and small suppliers without the need for additional systems;
• it requires less paper and organisational overhead.
  

From complaint to customer loyalty

A complaint is a chance to surprise a dissatisfied customer in a positive way. However, that only applies if complaints are handled professionally, fully and on time. Having a solid complaints management system is very much needed, particularly in chains where the complexity means that it may not be immediately clear in which company a problem has arisen and who has to take what steps to resolve the problem. Complaints management is therefore a natural element of ChainPoint.

If these staff members fail to respond in time, ChainPoint will remind them at fixed moments. In addition, a complaint manager can follow the handling of the complaint on the startup screen and can intervene as necessary.
The complaint will be archived carefully after the end of the process.ChainPoint BI (Business Intelligence) lets quality managers generate standard or customised reports about complaints at the end of a period and present the information using the ChainPoint portal.

A lot of business information management systems support the processes and transactions within a single organisation (such as ERP) or between the supplier and the customer (such as EDI and SCM). Chain control can immediately involve three or more links. Other systems frequently used in the chain (such as audit management and tracking & tracing systems) only support a single chain function.

That does not mean that these systems have no value in terms of chain control. On the contrary, most systems are excellent at fulfilling the tasks for which they have been developed. Taken individually, though, all these systems fail to offer the broad perspective or the flexibility required to control chains effectively.

In our opinion, a system which optimally supports chain management – the ideal chain information management system – should offer three generic functions:

1. It should collect relevant data from the links in the chain that are being managed.
2. Smart business intelligence software should be able to extract useful information from the data, forming the basis for taking strategic decisions.
3. As a platform, the system must cater for the communication, and therefore effective cooperation, between chain partners.

Chainfood
Ten years ago, Chainfood set itself the goal of supporting chain partners in the search for efficient ways of cooperating. At the time, we had an idea of what we wanted to achieve and how we were going to approach it. But we also knew that we still had to learn the most important lessons. After all, Chainfood is itself also part of a chain that is changing continuously and demands continuous modifications, yet still needs some kind of durability, particularly in the confidence of our customers.

We had to find a working method that serves both interests: a stable product in which the key features have matured and been tested with many customers over the years, as well as being a platform that lets us add new functionalities based on new insights. Not only insights that we can base on our knowledge of the agricultural and food sectors, but also insights developed by our customers, who naturally know their own chain much better. From the beginning, our mantra was therefore “optimum flexibility”.

A future for the world and for your company

Demand for sustainably produced goods continues to rise. If you are able to meet this demand, you will add value for your customers and at the same time contribute to the continuity of your own company. However, sustainability is a broad concept under which a variety of demands may be imposed in different market segments. It is also a concept, though, that lets you positively distinguish yourself from your competitors.

How do you realise sustainability? Companies in the agricultural and food sectors are specialising more and more, as well as operating in increasingly larger global networks. Improving your own processes with any eye on sustainability is not enough in this situation. To improve the quality of your products, you need the cooperation of the entire chain. You must therefore consider the complete value chain as a whole.

But how can you do that? This is where ChainPoint can help you.

If you work with numerous suppliers in different countries and time zones, you will know that collecting reliable information is seldom as simple as it should be. ChainPoint offers you a platform for cooperation that lets you gather information effectively and share it with your customers and suppliers. ChainPoint allows chain partners to coordinate their business processes and activities to fit in with each other better. It supports your management by providing reliable and up-to-date critical performance indicators, including ones about sustainability, providing insights into the performance of the whole chain. In other words, ChainPoint makes the chain transparent.

Discovering and guaranteeing quality

Quality management aims to continuously improve products, services, processes and organisational structures. In this context, the concept of 'quality' covers the added value for customers and the reliability, safety and sustainability of processes on the one hand, and the costs arising from that added value on the other. Because ChainPoint is a platform where all the vital information from the chain is brought together, it is also the ideal instrument for supporting quality management.

A phrase often quoted in this context is: "If you let yourself be driven by the costs, quality will go down. If you are driven by quality, the costs will go down."

ChainPoint lets you collect all kinds of quality data through various interfaces. The system assists you in bringing together and translating data into useful information, presenting that information in a user-friendly way to all authorised persons.

It lets you draw up quality requirements and record them in ChainPoint. The system monitors the chain against these criteria and can raise the alarm when deviations are too large. Workflows that suggest and monitor proposed counter-measures can be initiated in those cases.

ChainPoint does more than just let you guarantee quality: you can also discover quality. ChainPoint BI makes it possible for you to analyse collected data and discover all kinds of relationships and trends that could be sources of inspiration for new quality projects.

Whether it is about food safety, sustainability, product quality or effectiveness, ChainPoint is an instrument that will let you take the quality of the chain up to the next level. Examine the options for your sector together with our experts.

User-friendliness is key to document management

Documentation is playing an increasingly important role in the agricultural and food sectors. Some documents accompany specific products and transactions and have a temporary function; others relate to processes or organisations and are read, edited and distributed over and over again by various people. It is crucial that they are available, up to date and reliable, and that the access rights are strictly controlled: who is allowed to read, edit or distribute a given document, or to grant others rights to do so? Chainfood offers you a very user-friendly and flexible solution that can be integrated easily with existing IT solutions.

Chainfood's document management is based on Microsoft SharePoint and ChainPoint. This solution has a variety of uses, both within a company and in cooperation between customers and suppliers. The system monitors the entire document lifecycle, from creating and editing documents to distributing and archiving them. The integration with MS Office, the MS Office look & feel, support for multiple languages and also the option of linking workflows to documents provide optimum foundations for document management in larger organisations too. Storing, describing, organising, retrieving and protecting documents has never been so straight forward.

Talk to our experts about the role document management could play within your chain.

There are various Tracking & Tracing tools on the market that let you recall products quickly and faultlessly in emergencies. These systems show you exactly where products came from and where they have gone. We cannot emphasise enough just how important such systems are for the food sector.

Although implementing a proper Tracking & Tracing system costs a lot of time, money and energy, you hope, just as with an insurance policy, that you will never have to use it. After all, never using it would mean that your business processes are functioning without any major problems. But why not use that same infrastructure for other things too?

Chainfood does not see traceability as a necessary evil. Although proper support for recalls is one of the key requirements, traceability also lets companies in the chain improve the quality of their processes. For example, Chainfood's Tracking & Tracing makes it possible for you to determine which conditions lead to producing the best meat products. Or it may let you determine that certain types of nutrients used during cultivation have a negative effect on the shelf life of a product at the retailer. Chainfood offers you insights into processes in the chain in ways that were previously impossible.

Yet another application of Tracking & Tracing can be found under the concept of Chain of Custody. For certain claims, such as sustainability, a chain must be able to demonstrate that products throughout the whole chain are collected, processed, stored and transported in a prescribed manner. Of course, in the agricultural sector, consisting of many suppliers, bulk products and liquids, that is not straightforward.

Chainfood supports the following traceability models: Identity Preserved, Segregation, Mass Balance and Book & Claim.

In short, it is not only in emergencies, but every day that you can benefit from Tracking & Tracing.

Make an appointment, with no obligation. We will be pleased to help you think what traceability can mean in your specific situation