Shanghai Freemen is a global nutritional ingredients supplier with an international team of experts, and offices and warehouses in four continents. From vitamins to custom nutritional specialty ingredients, their seamless supply chain brings everything together to save its customers time, energy and money. In the same way, when it comes to the technology it uses to support its operations, excellence, efficiency and affordability are key.
This year, Shanghai Freemen is celebrating 25 years of global trading and exponential growth since its founders successfully introduced glucosamine to the world markets in the mid 90s.
The company established its Australian offices and warehouse a few years ago in the midst of good momentum in Australasian trade, and is a Member of the Australian Food & Grocery Council (AFGC) and Complementary Medicines Association (CMA).
“We pride ourselves on always employing leading edge technology and so we’re very happy to be partnering with Bizcaps Software for our PIF V6 portal,” said local Sales Executive, Justin Smith. “The old Excel-based V5 PIF meant a lot of double handling and repetitive data entry and emailing. When we moved to the online PIF V6 we realised a range of efficiencies – our PIFs are now easily accessible and the whole process is just easier.”
With over 200 unique SKUs sourced throughout China, Shanghai Freemen’s Quality Assurance team is dedicated to close liaison with all its partner manufacturers, factory visits and pre-shipment testing. They work together with their partners to complete and cross-check PIFs, so the online portal speeds up the entire process.
“The PIF is critical to giving our customers peace of mind that our products and ingredients are unadulterated and ethically sourced,” said Justin Smith. “Managing the whole process as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible is important. The PIF Manager portal makes creating and sharing PIFs easy, and the support from the team at Bizcaps has been fantastic.”
Shanghai Freemen is just one of several companies with operations in China and other Asian countries where the Bizcaps team, with Mandarin-speaking staff, is able to assist local QA teams in their own language.
“The QA team love the fact they can draw down on the V6 PIF’s built-in library, and when we are completing the pre-shipment testing we now have one single securely-accessible PIF to use as a reference point, instead of multiple documents and specs. The way PIF Manager automatically issues reminders when a certification is due to expire has been a godsend. Our customers can be sent a V6 PIF if they have a portal or we can email them a PDF.”