Arizona Nutritional Supplements
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has stepped up enforcement to crack down on supplement companies making misleading claims and inaccurate labels. In this climate of increased regulations, lives Arizona Nutritional Supplements (ANS), one of the country’s leading supplement producers. ANS has long embraced honest labels and responsible ingredients as part of its commitment to making safe, high-quality dietary supplements.
ANS has driven a phased implementation of the complete TraceGains networked solutions suite to improve collaboration across its core business functions and to streamline the company’s supplier, quality, procurement, and specification programs.
ANS Company Snapshot
Arizona Nutritional Supplements specializes in contract and private-label manufacturing. Privately held, the company has operated since 1996 and employs more than 700 people in its 350,000 square-foot production and warehousing facility in Chandler, Arizona. The company develops, produces, packages, and distributes nutritional supplements.
ANS offers its products in various forms, such as tablets, capsules, soft gels, powders, and packaging, including PCR bottles, blister packs, packets, stick packs, and pouches. It also provides contract and private-label manufacturing services. The company sells through supplements retailers and distributors worldwide. ANS is the exclusive producer of Whole Foods and Amazon’s private label supplements.
We now have visibility into our supply chain.
—Tom Dubinski, VP Quality Systems
Antiquated document management
Like most manufacturers, ANS struggled under a legacy document management system that was expensive, unable to scale, and failed to provide business insight. ANS needed a way to streamline communication with suppliers while meeting stringent traceability and regulatory compliance requirements.
The journey began by installing Supplier Management to optimize supplier relationships and gain supply chain visibility.
With this implementation, they were able to benefit from:
- Scalable supplier management solution based on the SIDI™ (Standardized Information on Dietary Ingredients) Protocol.
- Automated supplier qualification, onboarding, and management.
- The ability to spot and correct risk and performance issues by supplier, ingredient, or item.
- Instant access to supplier status, with the ability to sort and filter all supplier documents with the option to email any document.
- Centralized database to create custom dashboards and reports tailored to specific criteria, such as allergens, nutrition, risk, and more.
Precise sourcing fast
Finding the right ingredients and suppliers was difficult for ANS, especially for international connections. With limited access to ingredient documents and information, selecting a supplier to qualify felt like a shot in the dark.
TraceGains Networked Ingredients Marketplace helped turn on the lights. ANS takes advantage of the robust sourcing directory to find and qualify new items, ingredients, and raw materials, while instantly collecting all the necessary supporting documentation with the click of a mouse.
Now, the entire team shares:
- The ability to find suppliers and items fast with sophisticated search criteria like country of origin, organic and non-GMO certifications, and more.
- Centralized database to create custom dashboards and reports tailored to specific criteria, such as allergens, nutrition, risk, and more.
Taking control of specifications
TraceGains digitizes everything, from specifications to certifications and uses the data to power dashboards and reports for increased business insight. When ANS executives were evaluating specification management solutions, they considered remaining manual, developing an in-house system, or TraceGains Specification Management.
In the past, ANS had more than a dozen Microsoft Word templates to manage their raw materials, which lacked the controls they needed to ensure compliance. The paper trails and email chains the company used to manage operations, kept information static. Teams didn’t have a central place to collaborate, and they lacked visibility into the production cycle of their products. Networked Specification Management changed all of that.
Instead of remaining analog, ANS fast-tracked many processes, thanks to:
- Networked specification management with supplier co-authoring.
- Automated version control for risk management and quality control.
- Workflows and alerts that drive collaboration and speed across departments and with suppliers.
- Competitive advantages of digitizing specifications, including instant access to information, business insight, and complete audit trails.
- Configurable dashboards and reports to determine compliance against label claims, nutrition targets, thresholds (like Prop 65 Lead amounts), and country of origin.
- Standardized specification templates for a professional customer experience.
- Streamlined spec sheets containing only necessary data.
Better than an ERP
Before TraceGains, ANS employees relied on separate systems to manage the routing of document review and approval. Now, the company leverages the workflow and authoring capabilities within Quality Management to streamline the control document review and approval process, from SOPs to production runs, across the entire organization.
“We wanted to extend the system beyond the production area and into all of our other document control systems. Quality Management has already sped up what was once a very tedious and manual process,” Dubinski said. Another draw for ANS was the configurable nature of the TraceGains suite of products. “We moved to the TraceGains platform to move beyond the restrictions and rigidity of our previous system, including its inability to speak with our ERP system. TraceGains’ open API let’s us pass data from our ERP system to TraceGains for complete supply chain visibility,” Dubinski explained.
Conclusion
ANS abandoned its legacy system for TraceGains and gained a single pane of glass view into all operations and its supply chain while streamlining business processes, driving collaboration, and automating regularity compliance. “We’ve taken four different business functions and brought them together with TraceGains, the impact on our operations is profound,” Dubinski elaborated. Having a single source of truth ensures ANS departments are in synch, supply chain risk is easier to manage, and operate with more in-depth business insight.
With TraceGains, all teams have visibility into active projects so they can work simultaneously, eliminating the need for manual version control or change management. It saves us a lot of time.
—Joe Pilewiski, VP R&D
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