DUBLIN, CA - There are so many moving pieces in our industry, and it takes a mountainous effort to keep track of them all. Insert iTradeNetwork, bound and determined to streamline the quality inspection process with its new program: iTradefresh.
Having quietly debuted iTradefresh earlier this year, the company brought the program to United Fresh, where it was met with more than a few incredulous “Why wasn’t this introduced sooner?”comments. Designed to streamline the inspection process, Fresh allows those on the retailer/buy side to standardize, automate, record, and react to their inbound inspections.
“A lot of the research we did in the industry showed that retailers had non-standardized processes to do quality inspections on all their produce,” Trey Ruello, Product Manager for Trace and Fresh Products shares with me, explaining where the need for a modern, advanced solution came into play. “We knew the industry needed a solution that enabled a more thorough and actionable inspection on all of its produce, be it in the field or inbound to a distribution center.”
Currently, the system focuses on the retailer side, although Trey informs me that the company is working on a system that the supply-side can use, too.
“What it does is it allows you to, across your entire enterprise, define and standardize inspections for your inspectors,” he explains to me. “And then the platform will guide your inspectors through those inspections, which are custom tailored to each product and each product category that you’re receiving. This guides the inspectors through the workflow of that inspection, allows our customer’s inspectors to hone in on the metrics they want to focus on, and automates the necessary calculations.”
Trey gives me an example to solidify the process: if retailers know they want strawberries to come in at a certain temperature, that information will be directly input when the inspector takes the temperature of the incoming items. Rather than being kept on paper records, the information is conveniently dropped into the system, compared to allowable thresholds, and recorded so that a retailer can view that data later. With respect to defining an inspection, for any given commodity, there can be about upwards of 20 different metrics, Trey shares.
“It was the goal to really streamline the inspection process,” Trey tells me. “It’s hard to get people to change, but once you have a platform that automates the process, it’s easier to move forward with standardizing that process.”
For those who attended United Fresh, the feedback was unanimously positive.
“People really like the platform. It’s something they benefit from and they wished we’d released this earlier,” Trey shares with a laugh. “They in particular shared that they liked the reporting component of Fresh, which leverages the inspection data to provide additional insights.”
In addition to the program’s success, the company will be hosting a webinar at the end of this month, where iTrade will be talking exclusively about inspections and how Fresh relates as a solution to problems within the industry.
“We’re going to talk about inspections within the produce industry and what the positives and negatives are,” shares Alexander Swart, Product Marketing Manager, giving me the rundown on what retailers can expect to learn from this webinar. “We’re going to use fresh produce as an example of what tools in the industry help improve the inspection process. We’ll also be talking about and our product does and how it can benefit retailers and suppliers.”
To sign up for the webinar, click here.
For more up-to-date news on how iTrade and others in the industry are looking to make headway in standardizing processes, stick with us at AndNowUKnow.
