In part 1 of this three-part series we covered the top three, most common arguments in the Food Industry, against embarking on a Digital Transformation journey. This week we’ll look at the next three in the list.
“What about Food Safety while we are doing it?”
Beyond the natural human negative reaction to change – we are mostly fearful of it – the concern about things going wrong while we are in the thick of it are very real and there are countless examples where that has happened.
Here is a little personal story interlude that illustrates the issue. When my first daughter turned two I realized that I had collected thousands of photos of her (don’t judge). As any person involved in technology should be, I was acutely aware of the risk of loosing the photos that were not backed up anywhere. So I went out, bought a new external drive (that was before the plethora of low-cost, online services) and started backing them up. To this day, I have no idea how this happened but the process crashed so majestically that it did not only trash the backup drive but also my original drive where the photos were stored. And yes, I did recover 90% of them, but that took four weeks of manual reconstruction and recovery of the original drive. So a process that was supposed to take a couple hours unattended, ended up taking more like 100 hours of hard work.
The corollary here is that fearing that technology failures could compromise food safety standards, are real and need to be taken seriously.
Digital systems often enhance food safety through improved traceability, real-time monitoring, and automated quality control. They can help identify and address safety issues more quickly than manual processes. It is up to the teams involved in planning and implementing the Digital Transformation process to be thorough in their risk analysis step, identify potential pitfalls and implement in a way that eliminates or minimizes risk to the point that an failure does not compromise food safety. How does that apply to my personal story? Instead of going for a full unattended backup I could have done a couple tests and then a series of attended smaller, incremental backups that would have required possibly 10 hours of my time but would have been less risky and ultimately not risk my precious files.
“How will that affect our regulatory compliance?”
Regulatory compliance is important and perhaps the current method of doing things is working fine in that perspective. Ensuring new digital systems meet industry regulations can be complex and time-consuming. Do we really want to rock that boat?
In short, yes. We live in a world where th rate of change is accelerating. Policies and regulations that took decades to enact and implement, now take a few years. And while years may sound like a lot, in the world of food processing they are not. Let’s consider FSMA. The first few years of 2000 saw an increase in food born illnesses events. The first version of the law, called the Food Safety Enhancement Act passed the House in 2009. Less than two years later, FSMA become law in January 2011. The last major food before that was legislated in 1938, more than 80 years before FSMA!
Many digital solutions are designed with regulatory compliance in mind and with the tools to quickly implement new regulations as needed. They can actually simplify compliance by automating record-keeping, providing audit trails, and ensuring consistent adherence to standards. Automation is our friend in the world of Regulatory Compliance.
“It’s expensive. How do I guarantee our return on investment?”
It can be difficult to predict and quantify the exact benefits of digital initiatives. In many case the difficulty arises from the lack of dependable data from the past, with which to measure ROI. It is also difficult to measure ROI if that Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is not baked in the Digital Transformation Roadmap.
The first step in being able to measure ROI is to collect all available data from the past to establish your baseline. While exact ROI may be hard to predict, technology does help generate data that can help in the ROI calculation. Numerous case studies demonstrate significant benefits in efficiency, cost reduction, and revenue growth. Pilot projects can help demonstrate value before full-scale implementation. But it is important to consider this requirement from the get-go and not as an afterthought, post implementation. It’s equally important to recognize the time element in this calculation. Setting early on realistic expectations and monitoring over time with the ability and the agility to implement changes and corrections as needed as the primary drivers of achieving a positive ROI and where Delta T can help plan, implement and monitor a successful Digital Transformation journey.
