Westminster, CO -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/14/2010 -- "There is value in bringing in additional data," said Gary Nowacki, CEO of TraceGains, "such as in-house or third-party lab results or receiving dock feedback to get a holistic view of the supplier and its impact on a food business. We look at this as holistic supplier management." TraceGains produces online applications that help companies manage suppliers, ingredients, and other variables.
The mission at TraceGains (http://www.TraceGains.com) is to protect the brand of food and beverage clients by eliminating problems before product is shipped to the customer. This mission is in now way mutually exclusive from identifying new profit opportunities. TraceGains' Supplier Compliance and Supplier Impact applications identify how individual suppliers affect finished-goods yield, quality, profitability, customer satisfaction, or any other downstream outcome, giving companies new tools to evaluate their supplier base on much more than just price and on-time delivery. Thomas R. Cutler, manufacturing journalist, authored an important feature article in the current issue of Food Quality Magazine, titled, COOL (Country of Origin Labeling) Affects Continuous Supplier Performance.
Too often, food businesses have risks in their supply chain that they are unaware of. Risk trending shows how individual suppliers are performing, allowing companies to predict risk and take corrective action.
"The focus must be on reducing ingredient/raw material variability to help create a more consistent product that's easier and more economical to produce," Nowacki said. "The result is lowering costs while raising quality-we're looking at the supply chain, not the books of the company. While increasing procurement efficiency is an aspect of spend management, we're not looking for lower bids but greater adherence to quality specifications. Efficiencies are realized in multiple areas: quality, risk, purchasing, and strategic sourcing."
A supply chain is a concept, and a supplier is a vendor and a business relationship with mutual responsibilities. But suppliers need management. This continuous need for supplier management necessitates a continuous, rather than a point-in-time, audit. Each inbound supplier shipment and certificate of authenticity (COA) must be checked against quality specification without increasing the workload or requiring additional full-time equivalents. Few systems achieve 100% visibility on all inbound shipments. Some systems reject a COA, while some simply have a static record and neither accept nor reject.
TraceGains, Inc. is the SaaS (software as a service) leader in helping companies reduce costs and improve product quality-automatically. Food & Beverage, Quick Service Restaurant Chains, Life Sciences, Chemicals, and related industries can leverage the Supplier Compliance and Supplier Impact applications to eliminate manual certificate of analysis (CoA) review, automatically reject shipments that are not compliant with critical business rules, and rank-order suppliers based on yield, quality, finished-good profitability, customer feedback, or any other downstream outcome. The company is headquartered near Denver, CO, USA, with direct and partner offices throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
TraceGains Inc.
http://www.tracegains.com
Marc Simony
Director of Marketing
mms@tracegains.com
303-450-9009