As the largest contract foodservice company in the world, the UK-based Compass Group has operations in 50 countries and employs more than 600,000 people around the globe. This multinational company expanded its reach to the United States in 1994 and has since become the leading foodservice supplier to restaurants, hospitals, arenas, corporate offices, museums, K-12 schools, and college campuses. With more than 3,000 different suppliers and tens of thousands of products, the task of managing all of the required documentation is a massive undertaking.

“It’s the responsibility of our Quality Assurance team to make sure our suppliers meet certain standards and specifications,” says Jeff Mann, Director of Quality at Compass. “If we receive a customer complaint, we determine if the issue is with the supplier, and then we investigate to find the root cause of the problem. We have a team of dedicated specialists who manage the suppliers for all 24 sectors of our corporation. It’s a mammoth job.”

Ultimately, supplier management is an integral part of protecting the Compass brand, as well as its stakeholders. Mann says that’s why the company selected FoodLogiQ Connect’s Manage + Monitor to help them streamline their supplier management and to provide visibility into their supply chain.

“We had a very basic automated supplier management system that promised a wide variety of capabilities, but it didn’t deliver,” explains Mann. “It was very limited in the functions it allowed us to perform, and if we wanted to make changes, we had to ask the service provider to do it. That’s inefficient. We wanted an off-the-shelf system that was flexible enough for us to manage ourselves. FoodLogiQ had all the requirements to help us accomplish that goal.”

One of the many functions that Mann appreciates most about Manage + Monitor is that the cloud-based aspect of the system allows easy communication between the QA team and Compass suppliers.

“The tool’s automated features allow us to set an expiration date to notify suppliers with periodic reminders, such as, ‘Hey, you have a document expiring in 90 days, and you need to submit an updated version.’ That saves us a lot of time and energy sending emails back and forth and making phone calls. It just makes the whole management of supplier approval so much more efficient. And if a supplier hits a snag, they can just type in a message through FoodLogiQ Connect, and Compass can easily help them.”

Mann says Connect also offers significant benefits to Foodbuy, which is the purchasing arm at Compass Group. Foodbuy acts as a separate company within Compass that offers restaurant chains the opportunity to enjoy enhanced purchasing power through a membership business model. Foodbuy is responsible for finding potential vendors and suppliers and submitting them to Compass Group’s Quality Assurance to go through the supplier approval process.

“It’s obviously important for Foodbuy to know where the vendors are in this approval process and to have visibility into where the supplier stands,” says Mann. “Our old system didn’t provide that, and Foodbuy always had to wait until they received an email providing the yes-or-no supplier status. With FoodLogiQ Connect, they have real-time knowledge of where a potential supplier is in our workflow.”

Foodbuy also has the ability to look up information on previously approved suppliers to make sure their documentation and other requirements are current and that they are still in good standing. They can even review complaint information about a supplier and gauge how quickly the supplier responds to the issue. That’s extremely valuable when Foodbuy is in the process of renegotiating contracts.

“We only began working with FoodLogiQ in the latter half of 2018, but we’re already beginning to see ROI,” Mann says. “Connect is a powerful, multi-functional system that enables my QA team to be as efficient and effective as possible. It’s very liberating to have a clear, big-picture view of our suppliers and our processes. For a company of our size, that is critical.”