Jiffy Mix
A story of quality control best practices for supplier compliance and collaboration.Jiffy Mix’s pledge to its customers requires extra attention to quality in every step of the manufacturing process. In the past, ensuring all suppliers remained compliant with the company’s strict quality requirements meant a never-ending flood of manual tasks that threatened to overwhelm Jiffy Mix’s staff. As a result, the company needed a solution that permitted around-the-clock quality control without adding personnel or cutting corners.
With TraceGains, Jiffy Mix can — at any time — confirm whether a supplier or any of its shipments follows the company’s business rules and ingredient specifications.
Jiffy Mix Company Snapshot
Jiffy Mix is a 110-year-old, family-owned milling business that produces nearly two dozen mixes: Corn Muffin Mix, Chocolate Muffin Mix, Golden Yellow Cake Mix, and Fudge Brownie Mix.
Committed to making a high-quality, affordable product, Jiffy Mix is a complete manufacturer. The company stores most of the wheat it uses, processes it into flour for production, and even makes its own packaging. Jiffy Mix ships more than 150 million pounds of mixes annually, and its products are sold at more than 30,000 retailers and foodservice outlets worldwide.
Digitizing COAs and making them actionable with TraceGains has resulted in a 75% reduction of out-of-spec lots.
—Jack Kennedy, VP and General Manager
The Challenges
Jiffy Mix’s commitment to its customers requires extra attention to quality throughout every step of the manufacturing process. In the past, ensuring all suppliers remained compliant with all quality requirements meant a never-ending flood of manual tasks that threatened to overwhelm Jiffy Mix’s staff. The company needed a solution that permitted around-the-clock quality control without adding personnel or cutting corners.
Jiffy Mix faced several challenges, including:
- Too many certificates of analysis (COAs) needed to be manually checked against Jiffy Mix’s ingredient specifications.
- Manual and inefficient processes to retrieve data to support customers’ GFSI audits.
- Inability to predict supplier’s future performance or to evaluate them on anything other than price and timely delivery.
- No early warning of impending problems; operating reactively instead of proactively.
The Solution
With Supplier Management and Supplier Compliance, Jiffy Mix can—at any time—confirm whether a supplier or any of its shipments, is in compliance with all the company’s business rules and ingredient specifications. When suppliers are out of compliance or nearing a violation, the system automatically initiates supplier corrective action requests (SCARs), sends eNotifications to both internal and supplier personnel, and can automatically place suppliers on probation, suspend them, or reject any of their shipments.
The TraceGains solution also measures the financial impact of non-compliance and monetizes potential damage in areas such as manufacturing efficiency, finished goods quality, and product safety. Additionally, the system provides a comprehensive purchase order acknowledgement tracking function, with alerts for late or short shipments that can disrupt the normal supply chain operations.
The Results
TraceGains software solutions drive proactive quality control, food safety, and risk management. The overall risk to the company has been cut dramatically, and regulatory and downstream auditors frequently praise Jiffy Mix for being audit ready.
Average CoA Latency has fallen from 22 days to less than 22 hours, so Jiffy Mix can now address problems before they make it into its supply chain.
Decreased Ingredient Variability creates more customer satisfaction and cost savings.
Digital and Actionable CoAs allow bad shipments to be stopped before delivery saving the reverse logistics charges and returns processing.
Reduced Labor for CoA Verification allows for staff to be redeployed to higher-value problem-solving.
