Syntelic Solutions

Syntelic Solutions Named to Food Logistic's FL100

david_pratt@syntelic.com (Administrator) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:31:10 GMT

Food Logistics, the only publication dedicated exclusively to the grocery and foodservice distribution supply chain, this week announced that Syntelic Solutions Corporation was named among its coveted FL100 listing of software and technology providers in the journal's November/December 2011 issue

"We are honored to be named among the FL100," says Matthew Bent, Syntelic president. "Syntelic has worked hard to build a reputation for providing essential distribution solutions, and have gained a number of clients among the leading names in food service and grocery distribution."

Each year, the editors of Food Logistics recognize 100 software and technology providers that better enable grocery and foodservice distributors and manufacturers to realize their business goals. This year, the eighth year of the FL100, the publication focused on solution providers that are helping their customers differentiate themselves in the marketplace, while simultaneously facilitating improved safety and traceability throughout the supply chain.

“With the passage of the FDA’s landmark Food Safety and Modernization Act, the entire food and beverage sector is under increased pressure to improve safety and traceability throughout the supply chain. In addition, the ongoing globalization of food supply chains demands closer collaboration with suppliers and enhanced visibility from farm to fork,” notes Lara L. Sowinski, editor-in-chief at Food Logistics. “Technology is a powerful tool that can ensure compliance, mitigate risk, and serve as a market differentiator in today’s highly competitive environment.”

The FL100 listing serves as a resource for grocery and foodservice distribution and manufacturing executives. After receiving nomination forms from end users and solution providers, the editorial staff reviewed over 160 submissions to compile this year’s listing. Final recipients are featured in the November/December 2011 issue of Food Logistics, as well as online at www.foodlogistics.com.

The FL100 is not a ranking. The alphabetical list has been designed to help the readers of Food Logistics identify the leading software and technology providers in the food and beverage industry.

Why Can't My Routing System Do What Syntelic Does?

david_pratt@syntelic.com (Administrator) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:04:15 GMT

1. Can your Routing System import onboard computer data?

Routing systems are good for automating route planning using their own data. They aren’t typically designed to manage data from other systems. Syntelic loves data from multiple sources. The more data the better. Syntelic features direct interfaces with all the major routing systems including Appian, Descartes, Manugistics, Mcleod, and Roadnet. Likewise, Syntelic uses the telemetric data generated by on board computers (OBCs) from companies such as Cadec, Qualcomm, Peoplenet, and Xata. Syntelic merges planned routes with OBC data to give you one view of both data streams. It acts as the hub for all your data and is a flexible workspace that facilitates planning and decision-making.

2. How does your routing system present plan vs. actual data?

Roadnet’s past president described Syntelic as “Plan Vs. Actual on steroids.” Syntelic fully integrates data from your routing system , OBCs, and driver and equipment databases —all the data you need for deep analytics. Syntelic provides transportation intelligence. It offers powerful tools , calculations, and interactive views you can use to make your routes more profitable. You can drill down on any data point or roll up to summary views, filter on data ranges, and look for exceptions and trends. Switch instantly from plan to actual performance for any driver, any route, any delivery stop. As you do this you’ll have questions. Is this variance between my route plan and my route performance different between drivers? If so, why? Syntelic is your command and control dashboard for examining route profitability that you can then use to go back to your routing system and make changes.

Our customers use Syntelic to improve route profitability:

Out of route miles.
Excessive service time.
Delivery accuracy to reduce errors and damage claims.
Fuel efficiency.
Driver safety.
Customer service levels.
Route profitability.
Trends over time.

3. How flexible is your routing system when it comes to customizing views and performing analytics?

Syntelic provides dashboards, scorecards, and user-defined reports. Syntelic’s modern interface lets you see where you are today and where you need to be tomorrow. It is not a cookie-cutter solution. Syntelic makes it easier than ever to analyze your transportation data. You will better monitor and measure the metrics that are vital to your business success without being limited to the frustratingly static templates of some other dashboards. Syntelic provides the analysis you need at your fingertips, quickly, in an easy-to-understand format such as driver scorecards, saving you valuable time.

GS1 Lot Traceability

david_pratt@syntelic.com (Administrator) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:58:37 GMT

Outbreaks of foodborne illness from E coli, Salmonella, and other pathogens continue to make headlines and have sparked major recalls of meat, eggs, and produce. Public concerns and regulatory pressures are prompting many food manufacturers and distributors to implement new and better ways to quickly identify and remove unsafe food products from the nation’s food supply.

The Food and Drug Administration’s Food Protection Plan launched in 2007 is intended to increase food safety by focusing on a combination of prevention, intervention, and response. The FDA expects food manufacturers and distributors to implement ever more rigorous food handling and anti-contamination methods. The FDA also wants food distributors to effectively manage the data required to support the FDA’s own prevention efforts of risk-based inspections, sampling, and surveillance. Labeling food product cases with lot codes and logging these codes along with date and handling time stamps as products pass from food manufacturer, to distributor, to retail outlet to consumer, is a key enabler of the FDA plan.

Similarly, the Produce Traceability Initiative, supported by the Produce Marketing Association and other groups, seeks broad adoption of electronic tracking of all cases of produce by 2012. These and other food safety initiatives depend on standardized industry approaches to product traceback and rapid and efficient traceability systems. This initiative supports the global standards defined by GS1, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the design and implementation of global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility of supply and demand chains globally and across sectors.

Because food recalls are all too common, it pays for food distributors to have a plan and process for managing them when they occur. Being able to quickly and accurately trace back the location of any recalled products will help a food distributor limit the scale, scope, and expense of any recall and help protect the well being of the public.

Consider the scenario where a food manufacturer isolates a production or compliance issue down to the lot level and issues a product recall. If a distributor receiving items from the recalled lot can trace every case based on lot number, then only the product cases identified in the recall will have to be located and controlled. If the warehouse or delivery location of every case by lot number is known, the time, effort and costs to execute any recall will be minimized. Without lot traceability, all or more of that product type might well have to be included in the recall for compliance reasons.

Food Freshness

The perishable nature of food products demands that distributors move products out of their inventory before they spoil or lose value for exceeding freshness dates. In the daily hubbub of a busy food service DC, it is not uncommon for newly received products to be put away without rotating food products to ensure that older products are picked first. For example, instead of moving older stock to be physically in front the newer stock, the busy worker buries the older stock. When that product type is next picked, the selector takes the product in front without detecting the older stock behind it. Or, a partial pallet might languish as selectors pull only full pallets.

Case-level lot traceability systems can provide visibility into any build up of cases that need to ship to avoid losing value due to aging freshness dates. Syntelic can direct selectors to pick products by lot and their location, according to first-expired-first-out (FEFO) rules, to ensure that the oldest products are picked first. Workers must verify the location of products putaway, replenished, or otherwise moved, and at the same time verify lot numbers based on whole pallet tags or individual case labels for less-than pallet amounts. Syntelic’s advanced dashboards and reporting features can help managers monitor inventory levels by freshness dates and spot any trends to prevent excessive inventories of products approaching expiration dates.

Managing Inventory Loss

Being able to trace and track all inventory by date coded lots as well as by all product movements and work assignments can reveal patterns of loss due to missed picks, damage or outright employee theft. Reducing inventory losses by identifying their root causes and taking corrective actions improves financial performance.

Traceability at the Case Level

Most food manufacturers apply standardized labels to cases and pallets to identify product type, manufacturer, packing configuration, and date-specific lot number. Typically these labels are formatted using serialized numbers developed by the GS1 US food industry consortium. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are another less common way the contents of cases can be identified. Traceability systems use the information provided by manufacturers and will append it with additional information such as the ID of personnel last handling the cases, current warehouse location, and added time and date stamps. Voice and bar code scanning technologies can aid in automated collection and retrieval of this information.

Product items within cases may also bear serialized bar code labels with similar information, however item-level traceability has many practical challenges that prohibit its widespread adoption at this time. An individual product may not offer sufficient room to affix a label, or in the case of variable-weight produce harvested in the field, include any packaging at all. Moreover, having to label individual items would prove prohibitively expensive for manufacturers by slowing down production.

While accurate standardized labels on every case is a requirement for case-level lot traceability, some food manufacturers only employ pallet labels that include lot information. When pallets are broken up, an individual case’s lot ID may well be lost. Also, some manufacturer’s case labels may not conform to industry standards or prove difficult to read.

An accurate case-level lot traceability system must employ a system for efficiently creating new labels that include lot IDs when cases lack them, as product is received into the warehouse or at the point when cases are separated from a pallet bearing the case’s lot ID.

In Conclusion

To promote food quality and safety, food service distributors can deploy a system to track and trace food products by lot number and date codes. As a function of an inventory or warehouse management system, lot traceability enables a distributor to identify the location and count of product lots currently in the warehouse or previously shipped.

Syntelic Achieves Certified Business Partner Status from Vocollect

david_pratt@syntelic.com (Administrator) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:09:03 GMT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

GERMANTOWN, MD (June 30, 2011) – Syntelic Solutions Corporation, a leading distribution solutions provider and certified Vocollect Business Partner, announced today that it is now offering Vocollect Voice® and Vocollect's voice-centric computing appliances as part of Syntelic’s outbound warehouse solution. Syntelic’s Voice Manager for Vocollect manages warehouse selection tasks in real-time for every area of the warehouse as determined by Syntelic’s optimized load plans. Syntelic’s load planning algorithms factor in axle-weight limitations, route delivery sequencing, trailer configurations, product rules, and customer requirements.

“We are delighted to offer Vocollect voice technologies as part of our comprehensive outbound warehouse solution,” says Syntelic president Matt Bent. “Voice-centric technology offers clear advantages over other technology methods by reducing selection errors, increasing productivity, and lowering training costs. With Syntelic at the center of a company’s outbound logistics processes and Syntelic’s Voice Manager for Vocollect sequencing assignments, companies can reduce staging pallets, slash loading times and avoid double-handling that leads to incurred damaging of goods. The efficiency gains and cost savings with voice are are dramatic.”

“Vocollect is excited to add Syntelic Solutions Corporation to our channel program, given their extensive understanding of warehouse logistics,” says Gary Glessner, vice president of americas sales, Vocollect. “As the demand for voice applications continues to widely expand, Vocollect requires qualified value-add resellers and systems integrators to deliver essential consulting, integration and deployment services to customers. We are confident that Syntelic, together with its technology partner Speech Interface Design, will provide the logistics and voice expertise necessary for customers to reap the full benefits of Vocollect Voice-based solutions.”

Vocollect, a business unit of Intermec, Inc. (NYSE:IN), is the world leader in voice-centric solutions for mobile workers in the warehouse, offering highly accurate voice-recognition software and durable, wearable voice-enabled hardware for “hands-free, eyes-up” picking. Vocollect customers report measurable improvement in productivity, picking accuracy, safety and job satisfaction with a quantifiable payback often achieved in less than one year. Companies using Syntelic have quantified efficiency gains that provide a similar return on investment of less than one year. Syntelic is a web-based, secure, and scalable software solution that integrates with a wide variety of systems including warehouse management systems, order management systems, transportation management systems, onboard computer databases, and data warehouses.

ABOUT SYNTELIC

Some of the largest and most successful distribution companies in the United States rely on Syntelic’s focused distribution solutions to analyze data from multiple systems and drive daily warehouse and transportation activities. Since 1996, Syntelic Solutions Corporation (a Microsoft Certified Partner and Vocollect Business Partner) has offered supply chain solutions that enhance operational visibility, unlock process improvements, and give users flexible analytical tools to make better decisions. Two of the Transportation Topics Top 5 companies with private fleets employ Syntelic in their daily supply-chain operations. For more information, visit www.syntelic.com

SYNTELIC CONTACT

David Pratt

Marketing Director, Syntelic Solutions Corporation

David_Pratt@Syntelic.com

(240) 686-1180 Ext. 115

Driver Safety Scorecard Webcast

david_pratt@syntelic.com (Administrator) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 16:01:21 GMT

Watch Syntelic's latest on demand webcast: Driver Safety Scorecards (30 minutes).

Guest Presenters: Tracie Doyle, Manager of Transportation, Systems & Process for Ahold USA and Kevin Drouin, Regional Transportation Manager for Kellogg Company

Stay ahead of the federal government's Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) measurements and proposed tighter Hours of Service(HOS) rules. Learn how driver safety scorecards coupled with other driver safety initiatives can benefit your company.

What's the most effective way to gather all of your safety-related data in one place? With an integrated scorecard.