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In this episode, three leaders at Indianapolis Fruit discuss their experience in converting to Provision for digital food safety and QA.

The Client

Indianapolis Fruit proves that an established business can always continue to leverage modern technology.

Indianapolis Fruit distributes fresh produce, floral, and specialty food to retail and wholesale operators. Highly perishable fruits and vegetables make up the core revenue generation for the business. Since its inception in 1947, Indianapolis Fruit has grown to more than 250,000 square feet of warehouse operations and a fleet of more than 170 refrigerated trucks.

About 225 staff at Indianapolis Fruit use Provision for process documentation.

Key Outcomes

When Indianapolis Fruit managers empowered their teams with usable tools, they unlocked three sustainable advantages for the company.

1.

Visibility

While using paper, managers at Indianapolis Fruit found it cumbersome to keep a pulse on compliance. Paper documentation was often more inconsistent than desired because there was no real-time guidance for operators. And with no alerts for management, those inconsistencies were often detected days after paper documentation was submitted.

Using Provision, Chelsea and Chris have made it easier for teams to collaborate in the food safety program. Managers are now able to monitor compliance in real time, no matter their location. Data is easily searched and summarized to generate process insight.

Our food safety program was very paper-centric and difficult to access for each person(s) who need to be involved. Provision provided transparency and visibility across the organization and across different departments. That allowed us to create a greater sense of accountability.

Dan Corsaro • President

Provision has made it much easier to see everything as it happens. It’s given me more of a bird’s eye view – no matter where I am, being able to log in and see things and make sure things are up to date across the board, and sign off on things even if I am three or four states away.

Chelsea Mascari • VP Food Safety

Sometimes with paper we had to figure out where recent gaps existed, then we’d have to circle back with management. But with Provision, you just log into the system and can see where we’re at. It allows more people more awareness what’s going on.

Chris Bradley • Food Safety Manager

2.

Process Control

While they used paper, operators at Indianapolis Fruit developed varying approaches to food safety. This lowered predictability, prevented benchmarking, and complicated processes for managers. They wanted one central hub to control not only their documentation, but also the real-life procedures it reflected.

Chelsea and Chris leveraged Provision to unify operators’ approaches to food safety. Procedures and work instructions were linked into related records, and they used the task centre to delegate clearer responsibilities across teams. As a result, they have reduced variation and redundancy, allowing them to streamline processes and unlock continuous improvement. This has garnered positive feedback both internally and from auditors.

When you digitize things and leverage technology, you eliminate some of the opportunity for inconsistencies or varying approaches to the same thing, which can happen in manual processes. The consistency of the tool made processes as similar as possible across all our operations.

Dan Corsaro • President

Provision eliminates a lot of steps, saves people time, and allows them to do other things that make the business run better.

Chris Bradley • Food Safety Manager

3.

Food Safety Culture

The previous setup made it difficult to educate and earn total team buy-in for food safety at Indianapolis Fruit. Communication and understanding were strained by multilingual needs. It was challenging to reinforce employee training, because ongoing guidance was limited in the paper forms. Managers were strained to measure sentiment and performance over time.

Chelsea and Chris used Provision to make food safety more accessible and top-of-mind. They improved team accountability by clarifying roles, responsibilities, and results. Automated translation improved communication and understanding. Escalation workflows and reporting made it easier for leaders to get involved, irrespective of their locations. And when actionable business insights were uncovered, it furthered the commitment across multiple levels of the organization.

Food safety is an organizational culture – it’s not one department’s job. Provision is providing us better insight and the opportunity to hold not only our food safety team, but the other departments within our business accountable to owning and executing on a leading food safety culture.

Dan Corsaro • President

The main goal is trying to permit the food safety culture throughout the organization and hold people accountable. From a food safety standpoint, I believe Provision is more seamless, and it allows us to know where everybody’s at.

Chris Bradley • Food Safety Manager

Provision is accessed from a wide variety of devices, including phones, tablets, and computers.

How They Did It

Indianapolis Fruit accredits their success to a few key factors that differentiate digital solutions and their implementation approach.

1.

Prioritize Non-Technical Staff

Digital solutions can fail if operators perceive them to be complex or time-consuming. Indianapolis Fruit’s staff have praised Provision for its usability and low barrier to entry. Work instructions guide operators through food safety records, made easier by live translation and automated rules. This has reduced frustrating mistakes and saved time, helping Chelsea and Chris to earn universal adoption across their teams.

We have a very diverse employee base, and they all feel that Provision is highly usable. They don’t feel like they need extensive amounts of training. They’ve been able to jump right in and learn their processes very quickly.

Dan Corsaro • President

People don’t always like change. But I’m finding out within a week or two, as they go from paper to paperless, that they like the new solution. They find Provision to be user friendly. It’s easier to read, and once they get in the hang of it, it’s just more seamless. It’s straightforward.

Chris Bradley • Food Safety Manager

2.

Create Clear Responsibilities

Indianapolis Fruit uses Provision’s task centre to automate reminders and overdue tracking for documentation that could easily be overlooked. As a result, their teams are more aware who’s doing which activity, how to document it, and when it’s due. This has helped them maintain SQF compliance.

We definitely use the task assignment feature in Provision to send stuff out to staff to remind our team to do stuff, especially for the weekly and monthly paperwork. Those task assignments really do help.

Chelsea Mascari • VP Food Safety

3.

Enable Faster Detection

Indianapolis Fruit has critical limits and other rules in their Provision records that automate alerts when deviations occur. They use the feature to kickstart escalation workflows for managers, so they can respond to and resolve issues faster.

Provision has made it so information has to be filled out completely in order to be submitted. If they’re not filling out the form correctly, we’re going to know about it as soon as it happens, versus two days later or the next day.

Chelsea Mascari • VP Food Safety

4.

Unlock Data-Driven Root Cause Analysis

Indianapolis Fruit unified all their process data in Provision to eliminate blindspots and expedite audits. They use custom reports to search, sort, and summarize this data – allowing them to investigate issues more efficiently.

Provision has allowed us to accelerate our root cause analysis and be able to stop things or fix things in a fraction of the time that it would’ve taken to dig through old material.

Dan Corsaro • President

It does give you a lot more transparency than having to go through one piece of paper at a time.

Chelsea Mascari • VP Food Safety

5.

Integrate Systems

Indianapolis Fruit integrated Provision with their existing ERP system, so data could transfer between platforms seamlessly. This has helped the team’s visibility and coordination, contributing towards audit performance.

We have a pretty robust and I will say delicate ERP system, and Provision has done an extremely nice job of managing that integration process, getting data to flow back and forth with little to no disruption.

Dan Corsaro • President 

6.

Lean on Expert Services

Chelsea and Chris used Provision’s implementation services to configure Indianapolis Fruit’s account. By closely mimicking their paper forms in the digital platform, they reduced change management for their teams. Training services helped ease the transition and contributed to strong adoption across the organization.

The training support Provision gave up front was great, especially with our sanitation team, and with our managers, to help implement training for staff on the ground.

Chelsea Mascari • VP Food Safety 

Solution Summary

By prioritizing usability in a smarter system, Indianapolis Fruit has reached new heights in collaboration, accountability, and insight.

Indianapolis Fruit invested in powerfully clear data to foster a more engaged food safety culture. Using Provision, they’ve helped operators execute their daily activities with less confusion, while enabling managers to better identify, investigate, and resolve issues. This has furthered process control, benefiting both safety and quality. Along the way, Indianapolis Fruit has unlocked time savings to deliver a sizeable return on investment.

Provision has allowed us an opportunity to have peer-to-peer accountability and visibility so that we can help each other figure out where the opportunities exist and move faster towards resolution.

Dan Corsaro • President

Indianapolis Fruit managed more than 3,000 digital records in its first year on Provision, using the data to automate management reporting.

Time Savings

Estimated by Chelsea Mascari, VP Food Safety

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