Written by: Trade Interchange

Posted on: 15/10/20

National Chocolate Week 2020: Don’t be bitter about Supplier Information Management

There is no doubt that we love our chocolate – in fact, a report from Mintel has found that Brits are consuming more chocolate than any other country. It seems our love of chocolate won’t be dying down anytime soon either as global consumption rises between 2 and 5% every year.

Celebrating the world of fine chocolate from the 12th to 18th October is National Chocolate Week, an event that is sure to be popular with the eight million Brits who admit to eating at least one sweet treat a day. The continued rise in popularity now means that around 3 million tonnes of chocolate are consumed around the world annually, resulting in an industry that generates around £80 billion per year.

National Chocolate Week aims to promote fine flavour chocolates, independent artisan chocolatiers, and the chocolate companies who work in direct partnership with cocoa farmers, encouraging consumers to pay a fairer price for their chocolate.

ARCUS® Supplier Information Management (SIM) is a cloud-based solution that enables users to gather critical information, accreditations and documentation directly from their suppliers during the on-boarding process.

Supplier questionnaires are tailored to meet specific business requirements, ensuring that ARCUS® SIM users are collecting the information, including that which is required for company and government legislation, that they require from their suppliers. This can include the likes of supplier sustainability, modern slavery, and health and safety statements, all of which are known to be problem areas in the chocolate industry.

Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) is now standard functionality in ARCUS® SIM. Key supplier certifications, including the aforementioned statements, are scanned by the AI with 99.5% accuracy as they are uploaded to the system.

If the AI notices any discrepancy in the document, be that if it is incorrect, expired or the wrong document entirely, both the supplier and SIM user will be notified. This provides the supplier with the opportunity to resubmit the correct document, and the SIM user will receive a further notification on SIM’s centralised dashboard if they choose not to, allowing for efficient document review prioritisation to take place.

Thanks to the cloud-based nature of the solution, all supplier information and associated documents are stored securely in a centralised location, enabling all key stakeholders to access the data at any time and from any location. This further digitises supplier on-boarding for ARCUS® SIM users, and creates a fully auditable and effective process for managing, storing and sharing supplier information.

Furthermore, plug-ins that have been tailored to meet the needs of the food and beverage industry allow ARCUS® SIM users to approve and audit suppliers at a manufacturing site level.

The Manufacturing Site Information plug-in allows users to gather detailed information about manufacturing sites directly from their suppliers, enabling organisations to approve, approve with conditions, or reject suppliers’ sites.

Meanwhile, the Manufacturing Site Audit plug-in makes the recording, managing and scheduling of suppliers’ sites a simple and efficient process, allowing stakeholders and auditors to verify information provided in Manufacturing Site Information is correct and valid. All of the information collected in the plug-ins is stored centrally in the cloud, and sits alongside the supplier record in ARCUS® SIM.

If you would like to find out more about ARCUS® SIM, you can get in touch or download the AAK case study.

ARCUS® SIM Factsheet

ARCUS® SIM is a cloud-based solution that automates the supplier on-boarding process.

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Costa Coffee Case Study

Costa operates in one of the most challenging areas in the food and beverage industry for supplier selection. Costa uses ARCUS® SIM to help the procurement team to fully assess the large numbers of documents per supplier required to confidently approve suppliers.

Read Case Study