In early July, Share-ify — a supply-chain integration service serving the food industry — introduced Clar-ify. The product item management solution, which is now available to current Share-ify clients and enterprise food industry partners, was created with the produce industry in mind, according to Angela Nardone, the company’s chief operating officer.
“So many people want to go to AI, but AI is only as good as your data, so we really have to get that right,” she says. “This is to help enable organizations to better use their AI tools.”
The produce industry is also not like other industries, Nardone explains.
“Not every industry has things like pack, label, grade and size. These are things that are wholly unique to produce, and we truly understand that,” Nardone says of the team behind Clar-ify. “A lot of times, when produce companies try to do things like item management, they are retrofitting produce concepts into oil and gas or finance [tools]; reworking fields to kind of focus on what they need out of a system.”
Given the extensive variables in produce, and the often less-than-ideal item management tools being used, Nardone says there are ample opportunities for people within an operation to identify products differently within whatever supply chain system, or systems, the operation uses.
She gives the example of grape tomatoes; someone might identify them by what they are, another person might use the packaging they came in, and a third might use their country of origin. Add in typos or inconsistent naming protocols and the supposed number of unique items can balloon artificially, a prime example of dirty data.
“It’s not uncommon for small companies to tell me ‘I have 5,000 items,’ Nardone says, adding that a situation of information gone wild like that is a big problem for reporting.
“If I think I’ve got 50 different varieties of tomatoes, but really I only have five, there’s a big difference in reporting, and you don’t really have the accuracy,” she adds.
A clarifying process
According to Shar-ify, Clar-ify is focused on item creation, governance and regulatory data accuracy. It includes features to:
- Create and maintain items across systems
- Capture compliance-critical data, including allergen declarations, ingredient sourcing and sustainability and label claims
- Control versions and data integrity with built-in governance
- Streamline approval workflows through necessary departments; and
- Generate searchable digital catalogs with real-time item libraries
“It was purpose-built to eliminate the chaos of disconnected spreadsheets, siloed databases and legacy systems, while ensuring product data stays synchronized, verified and audit-ready,” Nardone says. “We help companies organize their item level information, and we help — if companies do have more than one system, which many companies do — connect all those systems and make sure that the data is consistent between all of them.
She says after making Clar-ify the focal point for an organization’s system of records, the goal is to clean up the dirty data.
“There is a cleansing function and service that we incorporate when people utilize Clar-ify,” she explains. That function involves things like cleaning up typos or unifying input styles — all caps versus title case, for example. After that, the goal is to create a governance policy of how future item data should look and be treated. This is done in cooperation with the client, Nardone says.
With the dirty data cleaned up and plans for how to keep new data squeaky accurate, users can focus on the future. For many, that future involves AI.
Improvements amplified by volume
Another unique detail of the produce industry is “that it is an industry predicated on high volume,” Nardone says.
“It’s not one cherry that I want to sell, I need to sell millions of pounds of cherries.”
As the saying goes, a million of anything is a big number. Even small improvements in data accuracy can have a big impact overall, Nardone says.
“Let’s just say you’re a company selling a million cases, so maybe you’re a smaller grower/packer/shipper, if you can improve a penny per case, that’s big money,” she says.
“This is an industry that’s got to manage the inches, and this is an inch that they can take back,” Nardone adds. “Better item accuracy, better decision making, better understanding of cost, better understanding of sales, better understanding of customer sales — all those kind of things that executives need to make better decisions.”
