Professional and consultative services to guarantee safety and quality of fresh produce

To solve a tricky problem you need to consult an expert sometimes. This is especially true in nowadays cold chain industry, where operations are becoming more complex, due to changes in the global ecosystem.

Helping Emerson partners benefit the most from their cold chain operations inspired Ashley Kinney, customer success manager, to help develop professional and consultative services, one of 5 modules that compose Oversight cargo services.

Available as a stand-alone service or simultaneously with one of the other modules, professional and consultative services combine modern data analysis technology with in-person control. The results are efficient recommendations that can boost your operation’s profitability. 

The professional and consultative services are a fruit of customer support “that we were originally doing in an informal way” says Kinney. Her team used to put together pivot tables in Excel spreadsheets to help clients understand and use their data. They were obtaining a lot of value from it, and their leadership liked it. Now they are also utilizing business intelligence to help interpret and analyze the data.

Observations lead to smart solutions

In the most difficult cases, or when you need a different perspective, members of the professional and consultative services will carry out on-site observations and analyses. They will visit your operation sites throughout your supply chain and prepare a detailed report featuring opportunities for improvement.

They went once to multiple warehouses and shipping sites for a California berry grower, according to Kinney. “When observing locations, we found their processes were inconsistent, which in some cases meant the data was not accurately representing their operation. We were capable of helping customers to refine their processes and improve their business operations.”

More recently, they visited a major produce distributor. They observed various processes, such as storing, staging, loading, shipping and unloading the products at restaurants, and they offered many ways to improve efficiency. 

Harvesting data

One of the average tasks that their professional and consultative services team carries out is to find trending data patterns and ways of improvement. The team not only finds the root causes of challenges, but zeroes in on where solutions are likely to be discovered.

For example, if you have pre-cooling issues at the supplier level, they can use shipment, sensor and location data from reports and scorecards to pinpoint which origin or supplier location has those problems, and then take the process to the next stage. “We can show you how you can use that data, or go on-site to see the supplier’s processes and understand their business at a more granular level.”, says Kinney.

About Ashley Kinney

Ashley Kinney is a customer success manager, cargo for Emerson’s cold chain business. She has been instrumental in growing Emerson’s customer success team and expanding the company’s range of value-added consultative and managed services since 2015.