Roadmap for excellence
The recent Australian Food & Grocery Council PIF Workshops in Sydney and Melbourne brought together 60 people from diverse companies, all keen to learn how PIF V6 can boost efficiency and productivity.
There was a lot of interest in PIF Manager’s affordable new pricing structure, as well as its powerful PIF V5 to V6 transition tool. This enables companies to immediately start receiving, storing, searching and sending PIFs from a secure repository – and be ready when trading partners ask for a PIF in either the new or old format.
As we head into the new decade, there’s plenty of interest across the industry in continuing to improve the PIF, with the AFGC convening a PIF V6 Implementation Group to promote its uptake and develop a roadmap to ensure it keeps meeting industry needs. We’ll keep you updated.
NEW PIF V5 extract from V6 to update legacy systems
If you or one of your customers still needs to update existing systems with the V5 Excel format, PIF Manager can now extract the V5 PIF from your PIF V6, allowing you to keep your QA, R&D, regulatory or procurement systems without costly upgrades or redevelopment.
This feature also means you can easily run parallel systems using both PIF V5 and V6 during your onboarding or transition period, all from the one simple PIF portal.
Navigating the labelling minefield
Correct labelling is an important step in ensuring that consumers enjoy safe and nutritious food and beverages. This is particularly important when it comes to preservatives, additives and allergens.
Fiona Fleming, managing director of the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology (AIFST) spoke recently to Food & Beverage Industry News about the help at hand for manufacturers needing to understand labelling regulations and other compliance requirements.
“It is important to remember that just because something is approved to be used in a food product overseas, it doesn’t mean it’s been approved to be used here,” she said.
The PIF, developed by the industry for the industry, guides manufacturers through all the information needed for legal and regulatory compliance in Australia and New Zealand, in a standardised manner – boosting efficiency and reliability. Manufacturers can find assistance from food consultants listed on the AIFST website or Bizcaps PIF Manager partners.
Disaster-proofing your data
The unexpected crash of a hard drive or the loss of paper files will, at best, result in many hours of work to reconstruct files or reacquire lost data.
Early last year, an explosion and fire in a food factory in a Sydney suburb meant that the entire product records of the company were lost. While losses like this can be insured against, the disruption that these sorts of catastrophes can cause may be fatal to a business.
Over the last decade, the use of “the Cloud” has become ubiquitous, economical and safe. When data is kept in the Cloud and backed up in a disaster recovery site, the chance of total loss of data is reduced to almost nothing.
This loss of data in catastrophic situations is one problem that the new AFGC V6 PIF system will solve. Bizcaps PIF Manager™ is accessed via the Internet and stores all data in the Cloud, in secure and backed-up data centres with the highest level of security clearance. No part of the Bizcaps Software system is located outside Australia.
Even if an entire physical factory or office is destroyed or uninhabitable, the comprehensive data now available on the V6 PIFs can be retrieved and transmitted from any device that can access the Internet. Anywhere – anytime.
Yours sincerely,
Dianna Gustin
Bizcaps Software
P: 02 9252 7533