The purpose of our software for food manufacturers is to allow innovation with compliance.
Whilst agile:NPDtech has many features to make recipe innovation easier, agile:SA was designed to take a lot of the drudgery out of approving and reviewing suppliers by automatically chasing them for all their compliance documentation whenever necessary.
That’s an easy to claim to make, so how does it actually stack up in numbers?
Through our customers’ experience of on-boarding and using agile:SA, we have some data to go towards calculating how much of a difference this is making to their working lives (as well as the more qualitative aspects of them telling us how great it is!)
Firstly, here’s a chart showing a typical on-boarding process.
As you would expect, the quantity of data being managed in the system grows over time – initially, your list of suppliers will be input, followed by accreditations and ingredients. The pace at which this happens will vary – some organisations can import everything from spreadsheets or other systems in one shot, others need to manually enter data by hand.
Then of course as a company gets to grips with being able to perform product development in a streamlined way, they can increase the pace of innovation without incurring additional time costs, leading to another jump in the quantity of data.
Here are a few interesting facts and figures we’ve pulled out. If you want to see your own stats as a customer, just open the ‘SA Overviews’ tile and browse through all the charts and figures.
- Most ingredients used by a manufacturer: 2,951 (of which 2,939 approved)
- Most suppliers being managed by one company: 2,291
- Most documents recorded per supplier = 3.9 on average (562 Supplier Audit Questionnaires, 932 accreditations, 770 other supporting documents, for 578 approved suppliers)
As you can imagine, having the agileChilli Chaser automatically work to keep this information all up to date is a great time saver, allowing technical departments to concentrate on supporting business growth rather than being a bottleneck to New Product Development. Even if each document only needs to be chased once every couple of years, there could be dozens of documents to chase per day, on average! Since many companies may not reply the first time either, that all adds up to a full time job just chasing paperwork.
And it’s not just supplier approval that can benefit. As Kim Trilloe, head of Technical and NPD at Beacon Foods says, “AgileChilli now automates our chasing of the initial feedback on Samples we send out. This has freed up a lot of our time, and has also hugely improved the speed, amount and quality of feedback we receive”
If you’d like to check out agile:SA or agile:NPDtech too, please contact [email protected] and book yourself a free demo.