“The fruits are decayed? They were good when we shipped out.”

How many times have we heard this line? Too many to count. People want proof, visual proof, for everything.

More so for fresh produce quality because it is too transient, changing fast with time and conditions. 

The pain of uncatalogued data. 

When your client wants to know if the nectarines you dispatched are orange and fresh, they want images. When you and your supplier disagree on the quality of peaches received, you need a detailed history of the lot.

Both of these scenarios mean scrolling through 1000s of images clicked by your team or dozens of email threads to find the right quality inspection photos or reports.

It is uncatalogued data. 

Even if you are ready to make the effort of finding the records, you don’t have the luxury of time. Besides, the assessment photos are never attached to the quantitative reports. Someone has to link them manually. That just means more labor.

To top that, all this uncatalogued data eats up space. These are gigabytes you have to buy from servers or clouds in addition. So, you’re not just suffering through extra work but also bearing added costs. 

The ease of a tracking tool.

What if you had a simple tool that generates a complete report with clear and complete quality recordings? What if the tool automatically attached inspection pictures to your quality documents?

It would save you time during and after the assessment. It would also give you a living record that proves quality to both your suppliers and customers. 

Software is feeding the world, making such a tool reality. One of them is Intello Track.

With Track, you never have to worry about losing records or digging up buried emails. It is easy to retrieve files because every image and report is stored in a cloud. You can do it with confidence and a single click.

The tool also strengthens your compliance with standards and makes traceability instant. Fill in the lot ID or purchase order number, and you can call up any quality document up or down your supply chain. You can even email the full report (with the visuals) to anyone from it. 

It doesn’t stop there either. 

Track feeds the data points into analytics so that you can see the bigger picture. With an intuitive and KPI-based dashboard, you can see trends across suppliers, growers, regions, or seasons. 

Picturing the future. 

Fresh produce quality teams rely on dozens of messaging platforms to communicate, plan, and respond. Emails, Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp are just some of them. 

They spread your data thin and leave you wide open to safety issues. Consolidating all your data in one tool, including pictures, saves you from the quagmire of uncatalogued data.

The simplest way to consolidate data is to keep it where the work happens. Intello Track facilitates this. Using the same tool, you can inspect a lot, track progress, create reports, share them and store them for posterity. 

Track shaves off a couple of hours from your quality inspectors’ daily routine spent filling paper-based checklists, copying them to Excel sheets, creating reports, and emailing them. You also gain more control over your quality processes, reducing customer rejections by 40%. 

In short, your quality inspection is not just a piece of paper moldering in a cabinet. It is a living knowledge point to be shared across all stakeholders. 

Devendra Chandani

Written by Devendra Chandani

Co-Founder at Intello Labs with 11+ years of experience in Customer and Marketing Analytics, Data Science, and Enterprise Sales. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.