Significant cost savings with streamlined digital processes
The tight-knit team of family-owned Alamir Bakery has produced authentic Lebanese food for the New Zealand market for over 30 years. The company has a strong focus on food safety and quality management, but this involved several manual quality and compliance checks that were still completed with pen and paper. As these manual recordings were time-consuming, hindered comprehensive visibility and facilitated manual calculation errors, the team was on the lookout for a solution to streamline their production and traceability processes.
Alamir Bakery consolidated and linked several production forms in the iMonitor software, streamlining processes and data flow along the production line and between departments. For instance, the team consolidated three different paper production forms for subsequent thawing and baking steps to produce chips out of baked bread.
Alamir Bakery reduced the time needed for batch traceability exercises from 24 hours down to just seconds.
Before using iMonitor, all of Alamir’s product and batch records were still recorded on paper and, therefore, hard to track and trace. In practice, all data was trapped in piles of paper batch records, leading to difficulties and delays in tracking the batch details of a specific product in case it needed to be recalled from supermarket shelves.
In practice, it took three team members eight hours each during a mock recall exercise to sift through the paper records to find the specific batch affected as well as the different dispatch sheets for each supermarket the product was delivered to. With the help of the iMonitor global traceability feature, Alamir Bakery reduced the time needed to run these traceability exercises to find the batch details and identify the supermarkets to which the affected product was dispatched from 24 hours per traceability exercise down to seconds. With 24 different products being digitized in the iMonitor system, the quality assurance team now knows immediately which specific batch needs to be potentially recalled.
In addition, the iMonitor platform gives full visibility and control of all production and compliance processes, including all subsequent steps. For instance, the auto-generated time stamps and names of users for each input give the management team an overview of who did what at what time.
On Alamir’s production floor, the original paperwork gave operators only the % values of the various ingredients that needed to be added during the production process to make the final product. The operators still needed to manually calculate the exact amount needed via a calculator.
iMonitor automatically calculates the exact quantity needed of each ingredient for the given batch size, eliminating any manual calculation errors and, therefore, reducing unnecessary production waste.
By introducing iMonitor to their production floor, Alamir’s production team started to capture the exact amount of wastage for each batch as well as the reason for it. This data capture enables management to run in-depth trend analysis and uncover areas for further waste reduction.
The family-owned and run Alamir Bakery based in Wellington, New Zealand, has made high-quality traditional Lebanese food since 1992. The team supplies their products that range from pita bread, to hummus and tahini to falafel to all major supermarkets in New Zealand. https://www.alamir.co.nz
