Printing News serves the entire Printing Industry with targeted content for the large commercial print segment.
COVER STOR Y
the food supply chain, this truism is spot on. Of course, while technology tools that boost visibility and transparency
are the first step in "keeping regulators off your back," acknowledges Sean Robinson, global industry manager, food and beverage, for GE Intelligent Platforms, the more evolved companies also view transparency as a "com- petitive weapon."
Although a host of Chinese companies have been implicated in recent
years for infractions that have hurt the credibility of their products in foreign markets, the mindset of that country's government and food com- panies has begun to change, Robinson says. Simply put, "They're trying to be a better trading partner," he explains.
It makes more sense to "offer a clearer path to ingredients, packaging, and other critical information of interest to foreign buyers, while at the same time avoiding inspectors tromping through their factories on a regular basis." Robinson describes GE Intelligent Platforms' solutions as the "back- bone for data in the factory." The solutions "make it possible to tie in lots of different categories of information," he says, "all of which contribute to very robust traceability, capability, and risk management. But, it also delivers the kinds of analytics that allow companies to look for process inefficiencies, equipment ineffi- ciencies, or other breakdowns that are causing excessive losses of materials." For example, "A quality manager can quickly see the ingredients that went into a product and immediately see whether a critical process like
cooking temperatures or mix rates were where they should have been. Whereas a continuous improvement manager, using the same backbone, is going to be provided with the data surrounding what happened inside that oven, that are going to be what he needs to know in order to tune the oven so that the right amount of natural gas is getting burned and the oven is operating more efficiently." Robinson adds, "We've also got very particular pieces that make it pos- sible to integrate both inbound data from a supplier, as well as push data up to an enterprise system or to an external system. That way, a major candy manufacturer can take inbound supplier data from its chocolate or peanut providers, for instance, and tweak the way they run their own factories so that they know the best way to re-melt that chocolate to get a properly tempered coat or the best way to re-blanch or roast peanuts to ensure they're not carrying any salmonella further down the supply network." Bob Gates, GE Intelligent Platforms' global technical manager, empha-
The U.S. ranks as the world's largest exporter of wheat.
sizes the risk mitigation aspect of implementing these types of technology tools. "During the 1970s, when the auto industry had a recall, it meant half a million cars had to be recalled. Now, they're able to send you an email and let you know that your car is one of 80,000. When it comes to the food business, they've started to do the same thing, and it's all being driven by risk mitigation. Sure, customer satisfaction gets a boost and quality is improved too, but the really big part is risk mitigation." Avoiding a recall obviously saves a company a lot of money, but it also goes a long way in protecting a brand. "If you get your brand out there for the wrong reasons, then you've just done more damage to your brand than you could have possibly done in 10 years trying to build it, due to one unfortunate incident," says Gates. Turning the discussion back to China, and the country's ability to attract foreign manufacturers based solely on the country's abundance of cheap labor, Robinson offers a different perspective. "Sure it can make economic sense to catch shrimp off the coast of
Oregon or Newfoundland and have it packed and frozen by somebody in China or Taiwan, but what we've seen lately is that companies are starting realize the cost advantages aren't as great as they thought for a bunch of reasons," he says. For starters, "Companies haven't done all they can internally to make the best use of operational and continuous improvement tools that they have, and then combine them with some of the data that may have been siloed in a quality or risk management system. Companies are using our solutions to break down walls between their systems. They're realizing that if they repurpose some of their quality or food safety data that teaches them about significant losses of material, significant losses of capacity, and they address those losses, they discover that China may not be that great. In other words, they can bring operations back home [to the U.S.] and they can avoid having to outsource a certain class or category of ingredi- ents or packaging material. "We have a customer in the diversified food business who's told us
that they've been able to reduce their material loss by 4 to 6 percent and improve their first-pass quality by 15 percent—those are the kinds of numbers that change your cost equation and make it possible for you to keep decent paying jobs in developed economies instead of always chasing the cheapest labor," Robinson says.
U.S. food sector getting up to speed According to David Mader, principal solutions consultant at Manhat- tan Associates, while the food sector has generally been behind other verticals like electronics and apparel in some aspects of supply chain man- agement, the sector is quickly getting up to speed.
18 MARCH 2012 • FOOD LOGISTICS www.foodlogistics.com
© Photos.com