Microsoft Windows Mobile Customer Solution Case Study

Food Manufacturer Speeds Inspection Reporting with Wireless Mobile Solution

Overview “We are constantly trying to improve our systems, Country or Region: United States and we saw this as a very big improvement to Industry: Meat manufacturing make our operations more efficient.” Customer Profile Bill Eisel, Director of Technical Services, Fresh Mark Fresh Mark, a private meat-processing company based in Massillon, Ohio, operates three plants that produce Fresh Mark produces processed meats for the retail and food approximately U.S.$450 million in bacon, service industries. Its products include Sugardale and Superior’s dry sausage, and food service products. hot dogs, lunch meats, hams, and a variety of items for food Business Situation service. Federal food-handling regulations make manufacturers Complying with United States Department of Agriculture regulations responsible for regularly inspecting areas of food safety was generating large amounts of vulnerability, such as the temperatures in coolers and smokers. paperwork without providing managers a consistent view of operations. Fresh Mark wanted to replace its manual inspection procedures with a computerized system that would ensure information was Solution Workers equipped with wireless accurate when entered, catch problems quickly, escalate them Microsoft® Windows Mobile™–based to the appropriate personnel, track their resolution, and reduce devices deliver important production information to supervisors in near real paperwork. It turned to Prime ProData for an application that time and establish an audit trail of captures data in the plants and transfers it over wireless production processes. networks. Plant managers now have near-real-time access to Benefits the data through desktop computers and pagers.  Immediately notifies supervisors of problems  Catches data-entry errors  Demonstrates the firm’s commitment to quality  Links supervisors and quality assurance in near real time  Provides an environment for quality “One of the smokers Situation on a clipboard, and a supervisor would The United States Department of verify the measurement. The USDA wants kept telling me to wait Agriculture (USDA) places responsibility for verification to be as close to the time of until tomorrow, he was compliance with food safety regulations on measurement as possible, but with paper manufacturers under a program called records it was impossible to verify when the too busy to learn how Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point supervisor signed off. to use the Pocket PC. (HACCP). Originally developed to make sure astronauts’ food supplies would be In addition, Fresh Mark has procedures for But once he sat down safe, HACCP replaces reactive spot employees to follow if a measurement falls and I went through it checks. Instead, it focuses on monitoring outside a prescribed range. For example, potential hazards that could cause food- the critical control point for bacon is 160 with him and showed borne illnesses by applying science-based degrees Fahrenheit. If an employee him the drop-down controls, from raw material to finished mistakenly writes down a temperature of products. 149 degrees as 194 degrees, that batch of menus, he decided it bacon would have to be discarded. In the was pretty neat. It At Fresh Mark, which operates three plants food-manufacturing business, where in Ohio to produce Sugardale and margins are slim, data errors can have a turned out to be a lot Superior’s hot dogs, lunch meats, hams, significant impact on the bottom line. less complicated than bacon, and a variety of items for food service, the HACCP rules mean that the “As HACCP has evolved, it has generated he thought.” company is responsible for determining its more and more paperwork,” says Bill Eisel, Jim Doria, Consumer Affairs Manager, vulnerabilities, monitoring them, and taking Director of Technical Services at Fresh corrective actions when necessary. For Mark. “It requires more reports and more example, employees have to check coolers sign-offs. One person has to do the task, on a regular basis to make sure the tem- one person has to verify that the task was perature is within the prescribed range, and completed, and someone else has to they monitor curing sausage in the smoke- review those sign-offs before the product is house for its pH levels and the length of allowed to ship. That creates a lot of time it takes to cure. The company cannot opportunity for human errors.” Building ship products until it has documented that it process guidelines and verification into an has met all the requirements throughout electronic process reduces the scope for the manufacturing process. human errors.

At the company’s Canton, Ohio, plant, In the manual process, responding which produces dry sausage like correctly to measurements that were pepperoni, staff monitor the pH of products outside the acceptable range depended on in the smokehouse. the workers knowing their jobs well enough to take the proper action—whether that “The pH level is a very sensitive measure was notifying a supervisor or putting a that must be closely monitored,” explains production line on hold. And problems at Jim Doria, Consumer Affairs Manager at one plant wouldn’t generally be known at the plant. In the past, a staff person would the corporate office until days later, when check the pH and write down the number the paperwork came through. products’ processing. They enter the critical Fresh Mark wanted a better way to monitor control point data such as temperature or its production processes. On the regulatory pH, and the entry is time-stamped. If a side, Fresh Mark needs to satisfy measurement is outside the normal range, government inspectors. The company also the device prompts workers to check and receives periodic visits from major reenter the information. customers who conduct their own inspections of the plants to check on The entry can be verified on the worker’s operating procedures. Pocket PC by a supervisor. Or, once the entry is sent through the network, the Solution supervisor can verify it on his or her own Fresh Mark turned to Prime ProData, a Pocket PC or on one of the many desktop technology company that specializes in the computers that are located around the meat and food industries and runs Fresh plants. Because both the original entry and Mark’s data center. Prime ProData has the verification are time-stamped, USDA developed an application for manufacturers inspectors can see immediately that the that it calls Food Safety Net. verification happened within the allowable time period. The application uses rugged Pocket PCs that run the Microsoft® Windows Mobile™ When a condition such as pH or 2003 software for Pocket PCs and feature temperature indicates a problem in wireless connectivity. production, the Windows Mobile–based device gives the worker instructions about The amount of data recorded for HACCP is what to do next. It can also send an alert to fairly large, and it is stored on a database a supervisor’s e-mail account and pager. running Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ Although the system uses wireless integrated server software. Prime ProData communications, the information it contains used the Microsoft Office Visio® is not always real time. The large Fresh Professional 2003 drawing and Mark plants, with their high-powered diagramming software to produce industrial ovens, present challenges to production flow charts, which are required wireless communication, whether it is data by USDA regulations. Prime ProData also or mobile phones. Therefore, the Windows wrote the desktop layer of the application Mobile–based devices store the data until a with the Microsoft Visual FoxPro® version worker walks into range of a wireless 9.0 database development system. The router. Then the information is uploaded desktop application models and automatically to the database. automatically diagrams production flow charts using Visio 2003 objects called from Workers can also conduct interactive within Visual FoxPro 9.0. analysis through online analytical processing using preprogrammed Workers carry the Windows Mobile–based templates, which are stored on the devices when they check the network. The templates use the PivotTable® dynamic views in the Microsoft do differently now because of what the Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software. technology gives them,” Caghan explains. “It helps to be able to talk to another After some hesitation, workers have quality-assurance person in order to do adopted the technology and now use it that.” routinely. “It’s extremely difficult to implement technology in meat and food Fresh Mark’s senior executives have companies,” says Susan Caghan, enthusiastically backed Food Safety Net, President of Prime ProData. “We have which helps overcome resistance on the seen a lot of technology fail.” floor.

To make Food Safety Net successful, “One of the smokers kept telling me to wait Prime ProData modeled the applications— until tomorrow, he was too busy to learn the versions that run on the desktop as well how to use the Pocket PC,” recalls Doria. as those on the Windows Mobile–based “But once he sat down and I went through it “…[W]e saw this as a devices—on a graphical user interface that with him and showed him the drop-down very big improvement looks familiar to anyone who has used menus, he decided it was pretty neat. It Microsoft Office software. turned out to be a lot less complicated than to make our operations he thought.” more efficient. Now we “When a company is running two or three shifts, it is difficult to break people away Benefits plan to build on Food for training, so it is important that appli- Fresh Mark initially deployed Food Safety Safety Net and put cations look familiar,” Caghan adds. Prime Net to improve the efficiency of its internal ProData takes key people to its offices for inspections and record keeping. If a quality-assurance classroom training, and then they train temperature is outside a critical control monitoring into the people in the plants, using computer-based point, the Windows Mobile–based Pocket training that Prime ProData has created for PC instructs the Fresh Mark employee on system.” the application. the next step to take, and the supervisor Bill Eisel, Director of Technical Services, can be notified quickly. Managers can keep Fresh Mark She continues, “We also train people on up with inspections around a plant or the floor, and we send a staff person who across the company by checking any of the stays at a plant for weeks. That is the only strategically located desktop computers in way; you are not going to be successful the three plants. For federal regulators, the unless you approach it from all sides.” company now has a time-stamped record of inspections and supervisors’ sign-offs. For the second Fresh Mark plant rollout, the company sent some of the production The company is now extending the people to the first plant to see how the technology to quality control (QC) system worked in production. throughout its plants. QC personnel will audit incoming raw materials using Tablet “The production workers need to change PCs that run the Microsoft Windows® XP their operational procedures, so they have Tablet PC Edition operating system and to talk those through and see what they will are connected to the same wireless “Fresh Mark itself likes the consistency, network. immediacy, and efficiency of this system,” Caghan continues. “Beyond meeting The key benefit is intangible: customer regulatory requirements for record keeping, confidence. Fresh Mark’s larger customers Food Safety Net provides prompts to regularly inspect the facilities themselves. advise floor workers how to respond to By adopting a mobile technology problems and delivers alerts to supervisors application for monitoring food production, in time for them to respond to and correct Fresh Mark demonstrates its commitment problems. It also provides a powerful to food safety and quality assurance. platform that Fresh Mark is using to continue improving the automation of key “We are constantly trying to improve our production and quality-control data on the systems,” says Eisel, “and we saw this as a shop floor.” very big improvement to make our operations more efficient. Now we plan to build on Food Safety Net and put quality- assurance monitoring into the system.”

The computerized system has already saved the company money because it helps prevent having to recook or discard product as a result of errors in recording inspection results. It also gives Doria, Eisel, and other quality-assurance managers a view of production across the company.

“We are dealing with perishable product, so when things go wrong, we have to make quick decisions,” explains Eisel. “Food Safety Net provides fast notification when something is wrong, so we can find out what is going on and take action quickly.”

“The standardization of approach at all facilities has helped Fresh Mark to reduce IT support costs,” says Caghan. “We are talking about a centralized database, a way to catch data errors when they are entered, and the assurance through time-stamped records that supervisors signed off on the inspection within a specified time. The government prefers that level of control. For More Information Microsoft Windows Mobile For more information about Microsoft Windows Mobile puts the power of the products and services, call the Microsoft Microsoft Windows operating system into a Sales Information Center at (800) 426- mobile device, either a Smartphone or a 9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Pocket PC, which helps you to stay in Canada Information Centre at (877) 568- touch and do more with the people and 2495. Customers who are deaf or hard- things that matter. Now you can keep of-hearing can reach Microsoft text everything you use up-to-date and telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) synchronized. To keep things simple and 892-5234 in the United States or (905) consistent, Windows Mobile runs mobile 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 versions of the software you already know, United States and Canada, please like Inbox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. MSN® Messenger, and Windows Media® To access information using the World Player, and Pocket PCs even include Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com mobile versions of Microsoft Office Word and Excel. With Windows Mobile, you get For more information about Prime powerful software combined with the ProData, Inc., products and services, call familiarity of the Windows experience, so (877) 497-2578 or visit the Web site at: you’re up and running right away, without www.primepro.com having to learn something new. And, depending on which Windows Mobile– For more information about Fresh Mark, based device or additional products and Inc., products and services, visit the Web services you choose, you can make calls, site at: send e-mail, send instant messages, surf www.freshmark.com the Web, or access the information you need, the way you need it, even when you’re on the go.

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Document published October 2005