G’s
Marketing
Highly
innovative label checking application helps G’s Marketing to substantially
reduce produce labelling errors & improve productivity
Founded
in 1952, G’s Marketing Ltd has expanded to become a leading UK and European
grower in the fast growing fresh produce marketplace. From its headquarters
near Ely in Cambridgeshire, the company services all sectors of the food
business. Customers include major supermarkets, independent retail, food
service and catering and food manufacturing organisations.
G’s had made
significant investments in infrastructure and ERP technology to provide the
business with key information on what was really happening to their
customers and products. However, the management team was increasingly
concerned on the sheer manpower effort involved in ensuring that all
products were correctly labelled on despatch.
A discussion
with its infrastructure partner Anglia Business Solutions revealed that the
company had a ready made suite of mobile applications that could assist.
These included the LINKFresh® LABELCheck application designed to prevent
product mislabelling. Working with G’s IT and QC personnel, Anglia modified
the application to seamlessly integrate with G’s J D Edwards ERP solution.
G’s Marketing
has now deployed a state of the art labelling application specifically
configured to meet the needs of the business. The solution has helped to
significantly improve the company’s efficiency in managing its labelling and
QC activities. The application has greatly reduced the risk of emergency
product withdrawals as well as providing vital management information on key
performance indicators within the organisation.
Company background
G’s Marketing was originally set up in
1952 by Group President Guy Shropshire. Since then, it has grown to become
one of the largest growers of fresh produce in the UK and Spain with a
turnover of £190 million. The company whose headquarters is based near Ely
in Cambridgeshire has always been committed to managing the entire process
from growing through to production and marketing.
G’s Marketing serves all sectors of the
food business in the UK. Customers include most of the main supermarkets for
whom G’s supply a range of own label salads and vegetables. The company has
also had a long term commitment to supplying the independent retail, food
services and catering as well as food manufacturers under the G’s trademark.
What sets G’s apart from others is that it is a truly vertically integrated
through to marketing organisation. It provides specialist growing expertise,
the very latest high care facilities for the preparation of ready to eat
produce and marketing expertise based on consumer market research.
The key to the company’s success is the
commitment to quality together with an innovative approach in meeting the
requirements of its customers. This facilitates the production of bespoke
solutions that ideally meets the specific needs of the client. Part of this
involves a significant investment in information technology to manage the
impressive growth experienced by the company.
“We have always viewed investment in IT
as an important part of our growth strategy” explains Group Systems Manager
Terry Potter. “This involved the deployment of a sophisticated server
infrastructure platform to extend the reach of our information systems
across international boundaries. We have also deployed an integrated ERP
solution to manage all of our business applications. However, we needed a
combined QC and labelling application to assist our despatch people to cope
with the increased amount of information required in the labelling process.
With the high volume and variety of products going through the business,
this was becoming a real issue for us”.
The Business Need
The amount of information on labels has
increased significantly in recent years due to traceability regulations and
the requirements of the major retailers. This has caused significant issues
within the fresh produce industry. As Terry Potter explained “Supermarkets
are now demanding more details on their labels than ever before. This
includes picked from location, country of origin, destination customer,
product description, label colour, best before date, display until date and
product class. When you add special offers to the labelling process, it is
very easy to get it wrong”.
The company needed an innovative
multi-lingual labelling and quality control solution for it’s UK and Spanish
operations that could seamlessly link to its core J D Edwards OneWorld
business management system. The purpose was to reduce the risks of product
mislabelling that could lead to emergency product withdrawals (EPW’s).
As Julius Joel, G’s Supply Chain
Director explains, “We had reached the point were we would have faced losing
business if we had continued to despatch produce with labelling
shortcomings. We needed an absolute safeguard on what we despatched.”
The mobile solution was required to work
anywhere in the world using various data connection mechanisms, whether that
be Wi-Fi, GPRS or cradle, etc.
A critical requirement was that any
changes made to the master data must be immediately available to all users
across G’s UK and European operations.
A further requirement was to reduce the
amount of time spent in the inspection of products prior to releasing to
despatch. In addition, the solution had to facilitate the automatic
production of key management information while reducing the administrative
effort involved in the process.
The Solution
The system is built using JDE Edwards
OneWorld as the core system. This is hosted on a SQL Server Cluster.
LINKFresh® LABELCheck extends OneWorld by taking key information about
products, customers and promotions and makes them available on a mobile
device.
Anglia’s Drizzle technology built on-top
of SQL Mobile takes this key information and replicates onto Mobile handheld
PC’s. These mobile PC’s use Drizzle and SQL Mobile to periodically
synchronise the data using either a GPRS connection over the public phone
network or over a wireless network depending on the location of use.
Fig 1: Showing data syncronisation in progress.
This store and forward solution means
that the application can be used without being connected permanently back to
a network. This is an essential requirement as the label check solution is
largely used in refrigeration units within pack houses or on in rigs out in
the fields.
Data is collected on the mobile device
then is sent back to OneWorld again using Drizzle. If an issue is found with
a particular line, product managers are quickly alerted to take mitigating
action. This is achieved by using a .Net component for sending email and
text messages. In addition a Digital dashboard has been produced using
Microsoft’s new Atlas toolkit for producing Web 2.0 Ajax applications.
In addition Anglia’s Drizzle technology
is also used to rollout automatic software updates. Previously, if a major
application change was required, all handheld devices had to be recalled and
issued with new software. This was impractical as G’s had deployed the
handhelds across Europe in Spain and Belgium as well as in the UK and a
recall would incur lengthy periods of downtime while the handhelds were
shipped back to UK. Now each time data is syncronised with the main
database, a check is performed to ensure software versions match that on the
main server. If an update is required it is automatically send to the
handheld along with any new syncronised data.
Fig 2: Showing automatic software
update roll-out in progress.
Mobile Application Description
The LINKFresh® LABELCheck application
provides a simple to use multilingual user interface that enables an
operator to run through a series of on screen checks comparing a presented
product label with all of the stored facets contained within OneWorld. The
mobile application establishes from the barcode on the label the type of
produce being tested and the supermarket despatch destination. Armed with
product and supermarket, the mobile LABELCheck solution establishes a
workflow path to ensure an appropriate set of tests are performed. For
example, head label for celery for Waitrose requires a different series of
tests compared to a Tray end label for Tesco broccoli.
Fig 3: Screen requesting the user to select
appropriate customer to determine testing workflow.
The workflow guides the user through a
series of screens where the user is prompted for aspects such as label
colour, use by date etc. The operative compares the label in front of
him/her with the onscreen prompts. If a problem is found then immediately
the issue is sent automatically back to OneWorld using Drizzle.
G’s had also recognised an increasing
requirement within the fresh produce industry to be able to handle catch
weights. This will become an increasingly important requirement for
organisations who supply supermarkets. As part of the label verification
process LABELCheck checks that the correct “pack-size” and corresponding
weight information are displayed on the label.
Fig
4: Screen requesting the user to scan
the tray end label for customer Morrisons.
To further improve the speed and
accuracy of the data that the operator is recording, the user is presented
with pictures of the correct labels available on the mobile device.
Providing the user with a picture greatly improves accuracy as it is very
easy to establish the difference between a printed label and the onscreen
definitive version.
Fig 5: Mobile handheld device showing visual
comparison image of actual label being tested
In addition the operator can also
perform a wide range of QC checks. These include temperature, colouration,
bruising or testing for any number of crop diseases.
The advantage of the approach taken is
that the setup and management of the entire testing process is all managed
centrally. A change in requirements or new mandate from any one of the
supermarket customers can be easily made available by a simple single
central change within the OneWorld application.
The Operator Experience
All the operator is required to-do is
identify themselves to the mobile device by presenting a personal barcode
that logs them onto the label check application. Once the user is logged on,
the synchronisation of data to/from OneWorld and the setup for the users
preferred language is automatically triggered. To accommodate the
multi-lingual seasonal workforce employed by G’s at its operations in Span,
Belgium and Holland, there was a requirement for LABELCheck to be easily
configured to accommodate any language requirements. Using Microsoft Compact
.NET framework tools for software localisation, Anglia ensured that each
screen provided on the handheld devices was localisable to any language.
This means that G’s can carry out their own translations of the on screen
information using their own native speaking employees.
G’s already have already localised the
LABELCheck application in Spain where the end-to-end Spanish translation of
all screens has been deployed. Translations for Holland and Belgium are
planned for the near future.
The system is also designed on the
premise that an operator should be able to use the entire system wearing a
gloved hand. This vital requirement is mandated as many of the users work in
extreme cold within refrigeration units.
In the event of a test failure, the
system generates an immediate SMS, Text message or e-mail to selected key
personnel. This allows corrective action to be taken at the earliest
opportunity before additional costs are incurred.
Fig 6. SMS Failure Alert TXT Message, showing; product,
customer, reason for failure, user, location where test
was
completed and which handheld was used.
Similarly, once a positive test result
has been returned by LABELCheck, an update is sent back to the main server.
This triggers a “positive release” procedure which alerts the despatch
operatives that the appropriate pallets have been released and can be loaded
and despatched. Produce is not released for despatch until a positive test
result has been received. This means that the accuracy of all produce
labelling is considered inaccurate until LABELCheck says otherwise. The
positive release procedure operates for produce originating both in the UK
and from Spain.
The positive release procedure was
implemented to avoid the situation where mislabelled goods were incorrectly
despatched because the Text or email alert regarding the labelling error was
not acted upon in a timely manner.
The Benefits
The LINKFresh® LABELCheck deployment
provides the company with a highly innovative labelling and QC solution that
is totally integrated with their business management system. This makes the
management of the system relatively simple as changes made within the
central ERP system are immediately available to the mobile workforce.
The system has also halved the time
taken to carry out the label checking activities as well as significantly
improving the accuracy of the process. This has helped to improve
productivity in the despatch department. However, the main benefit has been
the significant reduction in the risk of product mislabelling
Brian Crane, Despatch Manager of G’s
Barway Services explains, “It has increased our productivity and reduced
issues on the shop floor. Whereas a supervisor was previously working 11
hours a day we have now reduced his day down to 9 hours a day. I’d estimate
that we are benefiting £700 a week in reduced labour costs at this site
alone.”
Grant Lockhart-White, Group Finance
Director comments: “From a staff perspective, the fact that we have not had
any labelling errors since we put the system in has been a fantastic morale
booster. It has lifted the whole company. It helps them do their day job and
releases them to do the things that add value to the business.”
Julius Joel summarises “Product
withdrawals would have been costing us around £250,000 a year. We are now
looking at a situation where we have not had any product withdrawal costs
for a year so thankfully the system has paid for itself.
If we hadn’t installed this LINKFresh
LABELCheck solution, I can categorically say that we would have continued to
have label accuracy problems; we would have lost business to the order of
20% on some produce lines that would have cost us something in the region of
£10m of sales. Instead we are in a position where confidence in us is high
and we can continue competing for more share of the business.”
Hardware & Software
Development Software
- Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2005
- Microsoft Atlas toolkit
- Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise
- Microsoft SQL Mobile
- Microsoft.Net Compact Framework v2
Operating Systems
- Windows Server 2003
- Windows Mobile 5
Anglia Components
- Anglia .Net server and mobile components
- Anglia Drizzle Database Replication technology.
- Anglia DataMaker rapid development technology
- Anglia Mobile Auto Upgrader technology
Hardware
- HP Servers
- Symbol Mobile Handheld scanners
Services
- Business Consultancy
- Project Management
- Windows 2003 Server Set-Up & Optimisation
- SQL 2000 Set-up & Integration
- Workstation/Handheld installation & Optimisation
- Microsoft DynamicsTM NAV & LINKFresh® Bespoke Design,
Deployment & Testing
- ASP.NET Development
For further information contact:
linkfresh@angliabs.com