Forbidden Foods has slashed the time taken in entering PIFs by 20 per cent, and improved security, accuracy and version control with PIF Manager.
When Georgina Thursby joined Forbidden Foods as a food technologist six months ago, the innovative company was keen to reap the rewards of moving to online V6 PIFs. All their incoming and outgoing PIFs were still in Excel format, eating up hours of time in scrolling to find the information needed. Management could see the efficiencies the company would realise by transitioning to a PIF Portal.
“Making the transition to creating, managing, storing and sharing our PIFs online was one of the first things I was asked to look into in my new role,” she said. “I had never come across the Product Information Form before, so I was thrown in the deep end of the PIF world – it seemed awful at first!”
Undaunted, Georgina researched the PIF V6 system and signed up for one of the Australian Food & Grocery Council’s PIF V6 workshops to hear directly from all three PIF portal providers and take advantage of hands-on demos.
“I was already leaning towards Bizcaps and PIF Manager™ because as an Australian technology provider their support team is in the same time zone as us, which makes life so much easier,” she said.
“When I tried out PIF Manager, it was definitely the most user-friendly and simple. Its layout is so easy to understand, with features like drop-down boxes to select from. It’s so efficient to use because everything you need is literally right there in front of you.”
As Australia’s leading supplier of organic and conventional rice, and flavoured rice food solutions, Forbidden Foods is very aware of the importance of PIFs to aid compliance and help ensure food safety and ingredient traceability.
Since moving to PIF Manager, Georgina estimates that preparing and updating PIFs is up to 20 per cent faster.
“The Excel version was so overwhelming and you’d be scrolling for ages to find what you needed. With PIF Manager’s great new user interface you simply click on the section you need, and it’s easy to track your incoming PIFs, the forms you’re currently working on, and the PIFs you have sent out. We are saving around ten minutes in every hour we’re working on PIFs.
“Plus, sending PIFs through a portal is totally secure and trackable, and you can give people Read Only access which is great for version control. With our old Excel-based PIFs, people could just make any edits they wanted. Now, there is a lot less room for errors.”
And we’re glad to report that the support from Bizcaps has lived up to expectations! “Bizcaps is super efficient at getting back to me and it’s a great support to have them right there when I need them,” said Georgina. “Whenever I’ve wanted to talk through something, they’ve set up a video call or a webinar tutorial straight away. It makes all the difference having that level of support.”
Read more about Forbidden Foods here