About Taylor Farms
Taylor Farms is an American-based producer of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables headquartered in Salinas, California. As the world’s largest processor of fresh-cut vegetables, the company supplies to many of the largest supermarket chains and foodservice restaurants in the United States.
Taylor Farms is dedicated to quality and consistency when it comes to its food production processes. With the help of monitorQA, they now have a multi-location QSC platform that’s reduced the time to complete an inspection by over 50%, saving them nearly 20 hours monthly across each location.
monitorQA has easily cut our time spent on audits in half. It’s saved us a lot of manual work that we were doing before, saving us anywhere between 12 to 20 hours of work each month. We are thoroughly impressed with the software.
The Problem
Taylor Farms has been running a successful agribusiness operation since 1995. But being in the food industry comes with added responsibilities and inspections. After all, this is food that ends up on the tables of consumers across the country.
The company is audited by the Safe Quality Food (SQF), independent organic certifiers, as well as the USDA FDA inspections.
As a result, Taylor Farms conducts mock inspections of their own operations every month, for audit readiness. This is done to ensure compliance and readiness for all their external audits.
As auditing involves a large list of tasks to check off on an Excel sheet, it made for a very lengthy process. The company was always on the lookout for alternative systems that can save time and were user-friendly.
Taylor Farms needed a tool that did more than just make operational observations. It needed a tool that captured corrective actions and follow ups.
The Solution
Taylor Farms decided to roll out monitorQA’s inspection tool for internal audit operations. This allowed for a more robust tool compared to the Excel spreadsheets the company was previously using. The new solution was much less labor intensive and didn’t require as much in-and-out into the files for corrective action.
monitorQA allowed the company with much more flexibility and customization than Excel ever did. It also gave them a lot more visibility over all their operations, as every inspection detail was documented in real-time, with data backed up either on the system itself or on the cloud.
With reports that are generated automatically with photos, questions, and corrective action follow-ups, this tool significantly reduced the time it required to conduct internal audits. An easy installation process ensures adopting the user-friendly monitorQA takes no more than an hour at most for initial roll out.
The Outcome
Taylor Farms now saves between 12 and 20 hours each month. That’s without taking into account how quickly the company is now able to close out their inspections.
Where audits used to take 4 to 5 days to complete, Taylor Farms can easily conduct them in less than 2 days — cutting the required time by over 50%.
With multiple users integrated into the platform, it’s not just the auditor who has access to the inspection report. Managers also have access and visibility to implement follow-up actions. This has simplified corrective-action tracking within the organization.
The company also saves time with customized reports which automatically pull data from raw inspection files.
With monitorQA’s inspection tool, Taylor Farms has greater visibility across all their operations. This allows the company to better track performance and identify areas of improvement, and improve forecasting at a higher level overall.