QMS for FDA

MasterControl, a provider of software solutions that enable regulated companies to improve internal efficiency and reduce overall costs while accelerating time to market, and i4DM, a MasterControl partner, have been selected as the software provider and implementation team of a quality management system (QMS) for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA) selected MasterControl’s quality management software solution to be used by its agencies that are engaged in field investigations enforcement, and scientific laboratory analysis of field samples. The system will be implemented across the United States, in regional offices, district offices, laboratories and headquarters.

$2.7m spend by FDA

PPD, Inc. has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to evaluate the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) post-market spontaneous adverse event surveillance system. The company will conduct a thorough evaluation of the value of the spontaneous adverse event reports to support safety-related regulatory actions and report its findings to the FDA and the public. The award of $2.7 million for year one, is part of a two-year project of FDA’s Initiative for Maximizing the Benefit of Passive Adverse Event Collection throughout a Product’s Life Cycle (IMPACT). IMPACT, launched in 2008, is intended to fulfill a Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) IV commitment.

Dot Foods technology agreement

Dot Foods, the largest food redistributor in the United States, has entered into a technology agreement with 1SYNC – the GS1 US data pool – and Aligntrac Solutions following a recently completed pilot. Aligntrac and 1SYNC provide leading solutions for GS1 standards in data exchange among businesses, enabling them to upgrade the accuracy and availability of product information throughout the supply chain. (Dick Tracy, VP of Customer Development, Dot Foods.) Dot Foods Inc. carries 83,000 products from 500 food industry manufacturers and is the largest food redistributor in the United States. Dot Foods and Dot Transportation sell and deliver foodservice, convenience, retail, vending, equipment and supplies to leading distributors in all 50 states.

Online ordering for pizza

i Brands Corporation has signed a beta test online service agreement with Zucca Bar & Pizzeria, www.ZuccaPizza.com, a casual Italian dining restaurant chain specializing in New York style pizza and family-recipe pasta/sauces. The beta test will last 90-days followed by a roll-out into Zucca’s chain. Zucca’s management intends to growth their chain, firstly on a regional then national basis.

According to pizzamarketplace.com, “Online ordering is a fast-growing part of the pizza business. For smaller, independent pizza operations, it is important to develop an online ordering system in order to stay competitive.” QSR Magazine recently reported that “of the Quick Service experts surveyed, 51% predict online ordering to be 'The Next Big Thing'.” According to i Brands, less than 5% of restaurants in the United States offer online ordering.

Egg delivery routes: NFC shells out

Major egg producer and processor, National Food Corporation, has revolutionized the way it plans and coordinates its delivery routes to customers throughout North and Midwest America and the Pacific Rim. Using routing and scheduling software from Paragon Software Systems, Inc, (http://us.paragonrouting.com) one person is able to plan up to 50 complex routes per day to complete over 11,000 deliveries per week. This high efficiency also enables the company to provide third party logistics services for several clients, including some very recognisable names in retail.

National Food Corporation uses a combination of Paragon Multi Depot and Integrated Fleets software. This has proven to be the ideal solution to automate planning and optimize transportation from its distribution centers and DCs. The system replaces a time consuming, manual process that was completely dependent on local DC managers. (Kevin Bookey, Transportation Manager, National Food Corporation.)

Monitoring for 4600 stores' cold chain visibility

C&S Wholesale Grocers, the second largest food wholesaler in the U.S., has selected Par’s RT-200 monitoring solution for cold chain visibility and control of their products. Par’s RT-200 system will allow C&S constant real-time visibility and remote control of their refrigerated trailers while also affording for better yields in asset utilization and fuel savings. C&S Wholesale Grocers’ integration will optimize the protection of perishable products while in transit.

C&S Wholesale Grocers is the 12th largest privately held company in the United States. The company distributes food to supermarkets, retail stores and military bases across the country. Currently, C&S serves about 4600 stores from more than 50 locations in 11 states. C&S provides more than 95,000 food and nonfood items including produce, meat, dairy products, delicatessen products, fresh/frozen bakery items, health and beauty aids, candy and tobacco.

Email archiving and e-discovery

Windsor Foods has deployed LiveOffice Personal Archive and LiveOffice Discovery Archive to provide unlimited storage capacity, improved server performance and e-discovery capabilities to its more than 600 users spread throughout 11 U.S. facilities. A national provider of frozen food products, Windsor Foods required a scalable email archiving and e-discovery solution to address its rapidly growing data stores, which were pushing the company’s in-house mail servers to near capacity and beginning to cause performance issues. (Windsor Foods’ Vice President of Information Technology, Stephan Henze.)

USDA BPA up to $30 million

ManTech International Corporation is one of six companies awarded a blanket purchase agreement (BPA) from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to provide cyber security support. The BPA has a one-year base period, four one-year options and an initial ceiling value of $30 million for all six firms. ManTech was also recently awarded its first two task orders under this BPA. The first, to provide a vulnerability assessment of several USDA applications, is valued at $41,000. The second is a four-year contract to provide computer forensic support to the Agriculture Security Operations Center valued at $1.3 million. ManTech will continue to compete to assist the USDA in implementing new cyber security measures to ensure the proactive protection and security of its networks, applications and hardware. These measures will include identifying security vulnerabilities, responding to attacks against agency resources and implementing corrective action accordingly.

Common set of business processes

CAS has been selected by The Coca-Cola Company to provide sales force automation solutions to its bottler network, as part of the Program Scale Mobile Customer Management (MCM) initiative. According to Tom Miller, General Manager of Program Scale and Vice President, Bottling Investments for The Coca-Cola Company, Program Scale is designed to provide company-owned and franchise bottlers with a common set of business processes under the Coke One operating model, using the SAP platform. MCM is designed to take the power of Scale to the next level - extend Coke One to include advanced customer facing capabilities, particularly in the area of mobile customer management.

Ocean Spray optimizes marketing and trade investments

Ocean Spray has signed a multi-year agreement for the M-Factor Software-as-a-Service platform. “M-Factor has helped us to better understand what we’re doing right and how we can further optimize our marketing and trade investments to drive even more incremental profit and volume in the future,” said Larry Martin, VP Marketing at Ocean Spray.

Find Starbucks

Skyhook Wireless has formed a partnership with Android LBS app Find Starbucks, a simple location search app that finds Starbucks coffee shops nearest to the user. The app was released in early June and already has over 3,000 users. Find Starbucks is an example of a simple location-based app, popular because it serves a large demand of smartphone users: fulfilling their daily coffee fix. Find Starbucks can be downloaded for free today in the Android Marketplace.

Statistics on the mobile market have been added today at US Market Statistics.

$3 million network

Boddie-Noell has renewed its EverWorX Managed Wide Area Network contract with Contingent Network Services. The estimated value is $3 million. Boddie-Noell (http://www.bneinc.com) is currently the largest Hardee’s franchisee in the U.S. with some 315 restaurant locations.

Welch Foods warehouse and inventory management

Welch Foods has improved warehouse and inventory management operations with Gemini Simplified Interface mobile software solution (Gemini or G.SI) for Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM). With Gemini, Welch’s has improved operational control, inventory accuracy, visibility and order fulfillment by automating processes across three production/warehousing locations nationwide. Gemini, which controls inventory data collection and management across Welch’s entire product line of juices, spreads and fruit products, enables the company to trace lots and batches within 24 hours providing visibility greater than 99 percent of the time with inventory accuracy rates exceeding 99 percent. In addition, the system has enabled Welch’s to gain control over product compliance, a significant feat considering the ever increasing demand of food safety regulatory requirements. (Ray Gosselin, vice president of information systems and chief information officer, Welch’s.)

Cheesecake Factory Web Site

It was clear to Automatic that creating another traditional website was simply not enough for The Cheesecake Factory. After research and technical trials, Automatic presented the company: an ‘experiential’ website that brings the restaurant to life online. The Cheesecake Factory was founded in 1978 and has grown to over 145 restaurants with annual revenues of over $1.6 billion. The Cheesecake Factory’s full-service restaurants offer over 200 menu items including over 30 varieties of cheesecake. (Mark Mears, Chief Marketing Officer for The Cheesecake Factory.)

Take a look at http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/#lobby

Actionable insights for Nestlé Waters

Nestlé Waters is to leverage M-Factor’s software to provide actionable insights to allow them to optimize their trade spend across North America. “Fluctuating commodity prices impacting the cost of packaging, the impact of private label and the economic climate in general have made it more important than ever that we regularly assess our overall trade strategies,” said Dan Friedrich, VP of Customer Development at Nestlé Waters. “We need a strategic corporate level view across our brands and SKUs and need these insights to be available quickly to respond to market dynamics. M-Factor’s Software-as-a-Service solution offers the right level of planning and short implementation time that we need to improve top line growth in the near term.”

CRN for grocery store chain

TOP Food & Drug, a grocery store chain in Washington State that is operated by Haggen, Inc., has extended its customer relationship program, TOP Connection, to all 18 locations. TOP Connection, launched in September 2008 at four stores, is a customer relationship program that improves customer retention and store profitability by enhancing the shopping experience and providing unique value-added services. The TOP Connection program pairs Accelitec| interact, an on-demand customer acquisition and retention platform deployed as software as a service (SaaS) solution that is provided by Accelitec, Inc., with RFID readers mounted on top of payment terminals and RFID-enabled key tags containing unique customer identifiers.

Accelitec|interact is compatible with the legacy software used by many grocery retailers. “We’ve had an incredible response from our guests because they see the value and benefits we offer are not available anywhere else in the grocery industry,” said Becky Skaggs, Vice President of Strategy & Consumer Insights of Haggen, Inc. “This program has made it easier for guests to shop in our stores and for us to build relationships not based on discounts. It has made a difference to our business.”

Family organization solution

Cozi, a free web service that helps families organize and simplify their daily lives, has formed a partnership with Nestlé to offer a co-branded edition of its popular family organization solution. Nestlé will launch the Cozi co-branded service in conjunction with its back-to-school “Happy New School Year” campaign beginning July 15. Cozi has more than 1.4 million family members, and is available for free at www.cozi.com. Nestlé USA had 2008 sales of $8.8 billion. (Becky Chao, mom insights director, Nestlé.)

Bakery’s catering program

La Boulange, a San Francisco-based rustic French-inspired bakery, has selected MonkeyCatering to help develop the bakery’s first catering program with online ordering and end-to-end production management. La Boulange will launch its new website, www.laboulangebakery.com, next month and plans to complete the implementation of MonkeyCatering in the late summer to early fall timeframe. MonkeyMedia Software specializes in web-based operations solutions for the foodservice industry.

Alternative to plastic cards

CashStar, the interactive gift card and incentives company, has been selected by Dippin’ Dots, well known for its beaded ice cream. With CashStar’s technology, Dippin’ Dots will provide consumers with an alternative to plastic cards. Beginning this summer, ice cream lovers everywhere can order Dippin’ Dots gift cards online to be sent to recipients via e-mail. Virtual gift cards will be available on the company’s website (www.dippindots.com) and can be purchased the same way plastic gift cards are ordered; only the virtual gift card can be personalized with different images and text and is delivered via an e-mail with a link to activate the gift. Dippin’ Dots are tiny, cryogenically frozen beads of ice cream, yogurt, sherbet and flavored ice. Invented in 1988 by microbiologist Curt Jones., Dippin’ Dots are sold in nearly 250 franchised retail locations. (Anthony George, local area marketing manager at Dippin’ Dots.) www.cashstar.com

Logistics for tea

DSC Logistics, an integrated logistics and supply chain management company headquartered in Des Plaines, Illinois, has been selected as Lead Logistics Partner in the United States to Tata Tea group, currently the world's second largest tea company with recently unveiled ambitions to become a global leader in good-for-you beverages. DSC will offer supply chain and logistics support for Tata Tea group’s three main products in the U.S.: Tetley Tea, Eight O'Clock Coffee and Good Earth tea and coffee. DSC will also deliver logistics support for Empirical Group LLC which provides tea and coffee to Tata Tea group’s food service customers. DSC will provide full Supply Chain Services including: Network Design, Transportation Optimization, Logistics Center Design, and Transportation and Logistics Execution Services. www.dsclogistics.com (Chris Robinson, Tata Tea group’s U.S. Global Logistics Manager.)