Centric Software®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader and Bizcaps Software, the Product Information Form (PIF) management provider are pleased to announce their partnership to drive efficiency and compliance through automated information transfer capabilities for product development. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, price and sell food & beverage, cosmetics and consumer products to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
The Bizcaps PIF Manager™ is a secure, web-based portal and repository to easily manage the setup, storage, search and sharing of PIFs directly with customers and suppliers. As the first licensed online PIF portal solution incorporating the Electronic Food Data System of the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC), PIF Manager supports food suppliers and their customers across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the UK, the USA and South America.
A PIF contains all the product information like ingredients, nutrition, labeling, certificates and regulatory compliance. However, creating a PIF can be a resource-intensive, manual process; current practice for most food & beverage companies that require PIFs is to send and receive them in pdf or Excel formats, then entering them into whatever system(s) need the info. Further, PIFs and associated certificates should be reviewed and ‘renewed’ at least every 12 months (even if the information doesn’t change). The process is very involved—it is heavy and time-consuming as entire PIF contents in PDF format can be 20 pages long with hundreds of attributes—and it is a monumental task to manually renew and update each and every PIF annually, especially for companies with large numbers of products and thousands of ingredients. Updating a PIF and transcribing its contents into other business systems can also be at a high risk for error due to copy/paste mistakes.
The new connector between Centric PLM™ and Bizcaps will enable Centric food & beverage users to automatically create, maintain and send PIFs directly to their manufacturing and retail customers and ingredient suppliers via the PIF network from within Centric PLM. The process also works in reverse—companies can receive ingredient PIFs directly from their suppliers in Centric PLM. The spreadsheet-based V5 PIF has not been updated since 2012, so using it is a compliance risk. The electronic PIF version 6 (ePIF6) essentially eliminates all manual creation and entering of PIF data—both incoming and outgoing—because the information is already housed in PLM and simply needs to be electronically pulled into the PIF format.
By combining the information in Centric PLM with PIF creation, whole teams of people can be freed up to do more creative work, where human intervention and critical thinking are needed, rather than just entering data. With centralized, cloud-based PIFs in one place, customers can eliminate transcription errors, thereby reducing compliance risk, time-consuming manual processes and repetitive tasks of entering and searching for product information.
Forbidden Foods, a Bizcaps customer, had all of its incoming and outgoing PIFs still in Excel format, eating up hours of time in scrolling to find the information needed. By transitioning to PIF V6 and a PIF Portal, Forbidden Foods has slashed time to enter PIFs by 20%. In addition, they enjoy improved security, accuracy and version control with PIF V6.
The Australian Government’s independent statutory agency, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) gives the following stats: between 2013 – 2022, FSANZ co-ordinated 791 food recalls, broken out into consumer recalls at 87% and trade recalls at 13%. Of those, almost 46% were due to incorrect labelling, including undeclared allergens. Recalls hurt brand reputation and undeclared allergens pose a food safety hazard to consumers.
CEO of Bizcaps Software, Rob Clifton-Steele says, “It is crucial to get product information correct, particularly nutrition and food safety information. Having to transcribe and re-enter this data leaves room for potentially dangerous error. Automating these tasks between Centric’s PLM and Bizcaps’ PIF Manager drives accuracy, time-savings, streamlines compliance and renders the information searchable. PIF Manager also enables loading and converting the former V5 version of the PIF to V6, along with any attachments such as certificates, version control and backup.”
Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software says, “We are delighted that Bizcaps is partnering with us to provide faster and more accurate data exchange of critical documents among food brands, retailers, manufacturers and suppliers. We understand the magnitude of efficiency that the electronic PIF provides as well as ensuring that the right information is tied to each product to be in compliance. We are proud to be a part of this advancement in streamlining workflows and improved risk management with Bizcaps.”
