Ole Foods centralizes quality records

Ole Foods

Project Description

OLE Mexican Foods is one of the largest tortilla manufacturers in America with products sold from coast to coast. They offer a wide range of authentic Mexican products beyond the traditional tortilla, including chorizos, cheeses and Xtreme Wellness Products. 

Ole Quality Department employees stored information in disparate locations that included network file shares and Microsoft Excel files in local hard disk drives. Ole has created and standardized product information and a several quality management procedures providing a thorough training to its employees to ensure that the information and documents are stored according to corporate policies, but with so many disparate systems in use, the compliance process was complicated.

After managing their compliance processes in different locations and systems, including spreadsheets, Ole foods decided to start automating and centralizing their information. Ole foods' Quality Manager approach Werx Studio to decide and analyzed the different platforms available to automate workflows. The scope of the project included selecting a platform to use as a quality management system.

The challenge was to create a simplified, user-friendly and cost-effective Quality Management tool accessible via both the Mobile and Desktop devices - that allow timely reporting and resolution, and also maintain quality records with user-access privileges and tracking. Werx Studio needed to deliver a solution to accommodate the Compliant Management process and the Product Specification Management processes.

Other challenges:

  • Specific budget and time frame
  • Technology / platform selection
  • Data and process structuring
  • Disperse data sources

Ole Foods wanted to simplify the standardizing and compliance processes and make it easier for users to work with and share product specifications, but, like many companies, it also wanted to reduce the impact of introducing a new technology or business process to its employees. Ole wanted to ensure 100 percent user acceptance. That required implementing an easy to use web/mobile application.

Werx Studio evaluated a range of enterprise content management systems. The amount of development and implementation work required was cost prohibitive. We determined that a custom mobile/web application was going to be faster and, using a platform approach, can potentially become a comprehensive Quality Management Software solution that will meet Ole's enterprise content management needs.

Ole was attracted by Werx Studio custom front ends, quality and experience in .Net applications development.  Developing a custom mobile / web application allowed users to access the records easily and share them seamlessly. 

Werx Studio conducted a proof-of-concept implementation using Customer Complaints as an initial scope and starting with the must experimented users, the application was deployed to capture customer complaints records and store them in SharePoint, once the proof-of-concept was fully tested the team at Werx Studio started the development of the Product Specification Management module to manage document libraries without having to store any information in desktop folders.

Managing documents and approvals

In the new environment, Ole employees use a list view with  images to easily identify products and its specifications. Using the the application, employees also update, share and get approval for changes in products specifications.  The Product Specifications module sends emails automatically to inform specific people and teams about the changes or approvals.

Minimizes Costs, Maximizes Return on Investment

Ole Foods has experienced a significant cost-avoidance with the solution. The new environment greatly simplifies and streamlines Ole Food information management activities. For instance, Ole anticipates that it will reduce its data stores by 50 percent by eliminating duplicate files on the network, which will simplify storage administration and make it easier for users to find information. The company also anticipates a reduction in information sharing through email if the system is used as designed, because users will share the URL of documents on rather than the actual document through email.

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