Strengthening critical food safety traceability with technology
OPPORTUNITY
Grain Craft, the largest independent flour miller in the nation, had a business problem that needed a technology solution: ensuring traceability and accountability in their products. Being able to find the source of a flour lot quickly is important, but the company’s existing off-the-shelf software was inflexible and expensive. It didn’t track everything that was required, forcing mill employees to manually track additional factors on sticky notes and spreadsheets.
The company wanted to build its own software that would fit its unique business requirements and began interviewing custom development firms. Immediately, the team at 27Global stood out.
“Relationships and communication are critical to us. The more we talked to 27Global, the more they felt like people I’d hire to work for me full-time.”
-Chris Schuster, Vice President of Information Technology, Grain Craft
Solution
The 27Global team worked quickly to understand Grain Craft’s business problem and requirements so they could design the right solution—even donning hairnets to visit the company’s milling facility and talk to the software’s eventual end users.
“Talking with our teams at the mills was important,” Schuster said. “If you don’t understand the end users’ processes and what they go through, you’re not doing them or the project justice.”
After facility visits and regular meetings with Grain Craft, 27Global created an enterprise web application running on Microsoft Azure with .Net Core at the back end and an AngularJS front end. Because it’s an internal application that uses Microsoft Active Directory, it gives the end user one less step in the process by offering single sign-on.
Results
The feedback from the Grain Craft end users and leadership has been “overwhelmingly positive,” says Schuster. All the information needed to track flour lots is in one system, making it easy for users at the mills to capture and analyze all the required data at once.
“To go from an unoptimized system to a solution tailored to our business has absolutely improved our efficiency,” Schuster said.
The Grain Craft team has high expectations for any company they work with, and 27Global met and exceeded those expectations, acting as an extension of the team and taking the time to understand the true issues at hand, Schuster reported.
“As a milling company, technology has not been at the forefront of our business, but this project has been an entry point for technology in our facilities. Our managers and users are already looking for new features to add and ways to improve our businesses even more.”
-Chris Schuster, Vice President of Information Technology, Grain Craft