Designing an integrated environment for supply chain compliance

Goal

In late 2016 I was asked to evaluate and propose improvements to Azzule's primary product, the Supply Chain Program — and to add value to it.

At the time Azzule had several SaaS offerings designed for very different audiences, all ultimately letting their clients execute food safety and compliance tasks and move documentation to buyers or retrieve it from suppliers.

Approach

I had years of analysis of the product behind me as a customer advocate through the marketing lens. So rather than narrowing to the Supply Chain Program alone, I concluded the real benefit to the end user was integrating all of these services for genuine interoperability and automation.

Over the next two years, synthesizing the ideas and expertise of our best scientific and engineering staff, I designed an entirely new product — elevating Azzule's offering from a send-and-receive data exchange into a fully integrated business environment for supply chain compliance development, management, communication, and analysis.

I also designed a proprietary compliance management and evaluation tool called Compliance Activity Grids. Grids collect and evaluate compliance data against a customer's own specifications, created through a simple build process — something only possible because of the granular data exchange the integrated third-party services made available.

Results

Integrating third-party auditing, laboratory analysis, and program development services as verified sources into the Azzule cloud means supply chain users spend far less time downloading, organizing, emailing, uploading, and chasing down the information that buying and selling product depends on.

The product is designed to change how the fresh produce industry does business, to stay flexible as the compliance environment shifts, and to scale as more third-party services and their client bases integrate into it.