With over 600 SKUs, Australian Bakels has streamlined regulatory compliance with its move to online V6 PIFs, and is set to realise serious time savings. Its Bizcaps PIF Manager portal is also a key part of its commitment to quality control and innovation.
Australian Bakels is the largest company within the International Bakels Group, headquartered in Switzerland and comprising 38 companies across the globe. It manufactures most of its baked treats at its modern production facilities in Sydney, and also has first class Australia-wide facilities for quality control, product development, test baking and customer demonstrations.
This commitment to quality, with a national distribution network and international supply chain, demands constant innovation and efficiencies. As a part of its quality assurance strategy, Australian Bakels began the transition to online PIF V6 last year.
“It’s the reality of QA and regulatory compliance for our industry today. Changing over to online PIFs was a natural progression for us,” said Akila Rajanbabu, National Technical Manager at Australian Bakels. “We could see the benefits. Once we learned the old Excel-based PIF V5 wasn’t going to be updated to suppport the new regulations, we realised it was the obvious move for our business.
“We have around 600 SKUs, so we’re working through all our PIFs for our finished products. Bizcaps uploaded all our V5 PIFs into the portal, so all we need to do is edit them to convert each PIF V5 to the online V6 as and when we have the need. We have converted more than 200 already, and with things being a little quiet due to COVID-19 we will have them all done in the next four months.”
Once all its finished products have been converted to V6 PIFs, Bakels will be working with its suppliers to send product data electronically via the PIF Manager portal. “All our suppliers have QA and technical teams and so we are confident they will make the transition fairly smoothly,” said Rajanbabu.
“Some of our customers are used to doing paper PIFs, so changing to the online system may take some time and a little training. However, they will start seeing the benefits straight away, because once a PIF is done they won’t need to redo it but can simply review and update.”
“The benefits for our business are clear. All our vital product and trading data is maintained on the PIF Manager system, so we can simply go in and update any PIF we need without creating a new document. Once our suppliers provide their raw material PIF information through the portal, this can all be fed into the finished product PIFs without too much work. We will definitely see time savings.”