Good Food Group Fixes Supplier Performance with LeanLinking – Case Study

Good Food Group’s manufacturing and supplier network enables the food company to drive innovation, growth, and efficiency across the enterprise.This case study describes how Good Food Group overcame quality challenges in its key supplier engagements leveraging LeanLinking’s integrated supplier management technologies. Today, Good Food Group closely manages more than 700 of its food safety and quality-critical Tier 1 suppliers on LeanLinking, each supplier registering between five to ten compliance records which are assessed on a regular basis. More than 300 users across the manufacturing network access the system to ensure food safety and quality and drive supplier performance. In addition to improved business outcomes and stronger relationships with suppliers, Good Food Group has realized 50%efficiency gains driven by LeanLinking.

CLIENT OVERVIEW

Good Food Group Group produces a wide range of food products, which are offered both as branded and private label products including the Svansø, Skælskør and Danica brands. Good Food Group Group has nine (9)production sites and are represented in Denmark, Germany, Norway,Sweden, Poland, UK and USA.

Business Challenge

Good Food Group’s quality organization leads from the front in driving food safety, efficiency and innovation, thereby supporting growth and profitability across the enterprise. This is especially important today, as the food industry is under severe pressure to uphold increasingly higher food safety standards in the face of continuous cost pressure from its main trading partners in their tail industry. Good Food Group has made significant investments into its internal Quality management processes as part of its business operations.Examples include a training program for employees, process redesign, and constant monitoring of the manufacturing sites to ensure compliance with food safety and quality standards.

Good Food Group’s products feature a large content of ingredients delivered by suppliers for a range of products including jam, soups, sauces, honey, nuts, dressings and condiments. With millions of individual items delivered, these engagements present a business-critical outcome and require a robust supplier management program.

Good Food Group’s key supplier management objectives include:

1. Ensuring clear visibility of suppliers’ quality
2. Ensuring fulfilment of the intended business outcomes in an efficient and cost-effective manner
3. Enabling an efficient process to manage supplier quality.

“LeanLinking’s supplier management platform forms the technology backbone underlying Good Food Group’s supplier quality and performance practices, enabling us to collaborate in more effective ways internally and with our suppliers.

LeanLinking’s comprehensive and integrated supplier management functionality is ideal for Quality andProcurement teams looking to drive improved business outcomes and better relationships with an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use solution, without disturbing the business.”

Freddy Nielsen
Global Head of Quality
Good Food Group

Good Food Group’s existing supplier management capability was driven by a small, geographically dispersed team. This approach was proving to be inadequate due to the limited capacity of the team and the lack of automation. The challenges were multi-fold: Supplier quality was tracked manually on spreadsheets, changes were difficult to keep track of due to communication via email, documentation was stored in dispersed places etc. Preparation for quality audits were a time-consuming and error-prone process; audit preparation would occupy the team more than a month, and suppliers would be approached multiple times from several sites with exactly the same documentation needs.

Good Food Group needed to significantly augment its capability to manage supplier compliance, performance, and quality across the group, but did not have the luxury of adding resources due to budget restrictions.

Solution

Good Food Group implemented LeanLinking’s integrated supplier management solution for its ability to automate all key supplier management disciplines on a single platform.Other solutions were either too “consultant-heavy” to get started on and keep the solution updated, or were too complicated to operate. Good Food Group commenced the engagement with the implementation of LeanLinking’s compliance, performance, and quality management solution to manage more than 700 active suppliers across sites.

Key highlights of the LeanLinking implementation at Good Food Group:

• Provided centralized repository for collecting, updating, and managing supplier information and documentation (such as supplier product specifications, certificates, audit reports, CSR statements etc.) in one solution
• Configured an access-controlled supplier portal with self-serve capabilities, enabling suppliers to upload requested documentation directly into central repository and allowed audit trail on all changes made to supplier documents
• Supplier delivery issues are raised on LeanLinking, shared with suppliers through the platform and are resolved with joint coordination and actions
• Automated reporting on non-conformance cases and resolution times from real-time supply chain and performance reviews
• Integration with ERP system for centrally tracking and sharing all relevant supplier-related data (such as spend, OTIF delivery performance and credit levels)

Business Impact

LeanLinking has helped Good Food Group drive higher value in its food safety, quality and performance-relevant supplier engagements through better quality, improved supplier performance, reduced risk exposure, and higher efficiencies. Recognizing the impact of LeanLinking, Good Food Group is expanding the scope of its LeanLinking implementation to include more areas such as comprehensive supplier performance management and action planning.

Supplier administrative efficiency was improved by more than 50% percent, allowing one person to orchestrate an audit preparation within a few days, as opposed to previously more than a month. Cross-functional collaboration between Procurement and Quality department has tangibly improved, leading to a significant improvement in job satisfaction and reduced stress levels.

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