Business alerts catering for the food industry supply chain

RHM Foodservice (RHMFS), the food giant with such names as Paxo, Bisto, Robertsons and Sharwoods under its belt reports that its business-alerting technology from Categoric Software, is delivering return on investment. The system, installed about a year ago to serve staff with ‘business critical’ information without overloading them, started by improving supply chain management and invoice control operations, but has now also transformed the efficiency of processes as diverse as stock and sales management. The system – called Xalerts – now monitors all data sources on an exceptions basis, driving alert messages to operators and managers according to defined electronic business rules. It’s being used to monitor non-moving stock, over selling goods, low stock levels, stock adjustments, invoice errors and overdue customer orders across its supply chain. When exceptions are found, Xalerts sends an alert to the appropriate person or people inside and outside the organisation, via whatever multi-channel device has been set up (email, mobile phone, SMS, etc), in real time, and enables them to respond and initiate processes or take appropriate actions. Mark Lloyd, RHMFS business finance manager: “We needed a system that could be used as a management tool by interrogating [our] databases at regular intervals. Xalerts notifies our financial, sales and supply chain control managers as soon as exceptions occur. This enables them to interact and take action to enhance the efficiency of their departments, based on the up-to-date information delivered directly to them by the technology. “The alerting software has been a key solution in helping us to get important information to our staff in time to take action. Ultimately this improves our levels of customer service since we’re now always aware of issues that affect our own efficiencies.” One of the areas where a significant return on investment has been identified is in the processing of invoices. Simply speeding up this area by identifying problems immediately they arise has proved particularly cost-effective. Lloyd: “Additionally, since the software has the capability to send alerts to any device, there is a great deal of scope to share important information with our partners, beyond the walls of RHMFS. Using SMS on mobile phones, we could for instance, alert our salesforce to products experiencing higher than expected demand, thus enabling them to manage customer expectations of the product’s short-term availability. This will help us maintain and increase supply chain efficiency.” As for his choice of system, Lloyd says: “We needed a technology to manage the flow of business critical information around the organisation, but we were worried that any such implementation would disrupt our on-going processes. Having invested in a number of different databases over the last few years, and making sure that staff were comfortable with using them, the last thing we wanted was massive upheaval. “Originally, we thought we’d have problems in this area, and had concerns about losing productivity during the changeover period. When we looked at Categoric’s technology we could see the incremental business benefits and ROI it would bring. It was also easy to integrate with our existing infrastructure.” RHMFS reports that Xalerts was added to the infrastructure without disrupting its day-to-day functioning since the software sits on top of its databases without system integration.