Safety in the food chain starts with a streamlined document process

Uticon is a consultancy and engineering firm specialized in the food industry. By advising, engineering and project management, they continuously complete successful construction and renovation projects. Through their experience and expertise in the food industry and the continual rapid developments, food has become their core business.

Uticon is growing fast. At present, the organization has 125 employees and four locations with branches in Apeldoorn, Yerseke, Eindhoven (the Netherlands) and Gent (Belgium).

Uticon advises and innovates in the broadest sense of the word. A few of the disciplines offered by Uticon:

• Engineering and building construction
• Mechanical Engineering and Process installations
• Industrial automation and IT
• Logistics

Take the project at potato processor Lamb Weston/Meijer for example. Uticon supervised a new production site and a state of the art production line from start to finish. In addition to the advice and engineering, they also provided project management for the construction, environment and utilities. Budget control also remained in hands of Uticon and was adjusted where necessary. John: “This was an enormous project, Lamb Weston/Meijer invested 120 million euros in the new product location. Even when projects are this size, we are capable of organizing them independently. With such amounts involved, you can say that customers trust the expertise of Uticon.”

We value our good reputation in the market and realize that one mistake can be fatal. Not only for us, but especially for the customer if something goes wrong with the production process. If you are unable to facilitate a project right up to the last detail, you have to be honest with yourself and not take it on.

Uticon supports customers with the latest techniques in all fields of expertise. To keep up with these latest techniques, Uticon spends a lot of time and money on internal training of its employees. It is crucial to stay up to date with the latest developments in the areas of quality, hygiene, safety and sustainability. The food industry is advancing so rapidly, that you immediately lose your position in the market, if you do not keep track of developments all the time.

Uticon also continues to invest in digital innovation for their customers. John explains: “We are able to offer our customers safe and secure information sharing and processing. Uticon manages and oversees the whole digital platform and the customer has access to all documents. We deliver data real-time, make regular back-ups and are able to retrieve documents when things go wrong. We differentiate ourselves through continual digital innovation and I intend to carry that through. The next step is to optimize the integration with the existing customer processes and collaborate on a single platform. Teams by Microsoft is a good example of such a platform. For each project, the entire project team has access to all documents, calendars, task lists etc. Everything needed to perfectly streamline a project, comes together in Microsoft Office 365 and Teams.”

Common complaints:

• Inconsistent corporate identity; templates were sent out in various layouts;
• Unclear where documents were stored; were spread out across the AFAS CRM system and on local hard disks of various branches;
• There was no control over which documents were circulating within the organization;
• Different versions of templates; lack of clarity about the correct version.

John learnt about iWRITER through his Office 365 partner Portiva. After acquainting himself with iWRITER, he realized that this was the solution for him and his colleagues. His marketing colleague, Sabien den Hamer, joined him and together they formed the ‘iWRITER team’. John: “Sabien is responsible for the corporate identity and I’m responsible for the design and implementation of the templates. The team leaders and project managers supplied all the documents and briefed us on the wishes and requirements. With this input, we designed and set up the templates. There was no problem with compatibility with our AFAS CRM system; al contacts and organizations can be imported from AFAS by using the search function in iWRITER. In addition, iWRITER makes it possible for everyone in the organization to switch between the contact details of each branch with the touch of a button. Some parts of the text are fixed, but we want to give the employees the freedom to adapt a number of things themselves. This suits us as we are a flexible organization and it matches well with our flexibility towards customers."

iWRITER offers Uticon a complete document creation and template management tool. John: “To an IT Manager, iWRITER is an ideal package. The integration with SharePoint works perfectly, within two hours all leads have been automatically loaded into iWRITER. The Marketing Department has chosen iWRITER because the corporate identity can be applied very easily with iWRITER and changes can be made unambiguously and efficiently. It is easy to access, easy to use and very intuitive. The standards set for the documents by Marketing are guaranteed by iWRITER. Once iWRITER is in operation, no further effort is required. When setting up the templates, it is important to check whether all the data is correct, but once they are filled in, you will not have to worry about them anymore.

From the time the documents and templates were all in order, we communicated much more clearly with the customer. Now, when we share time estimates or advice reports, we don’t need to worry that we have the wrong version or the wrong layout. And we can be sure we have the correct customer data. If we promise the customer that we will make their food production process more sustainable and safer, we also want to provide them with (brand) compliant documents. Fortunately we can do that now, which in turn, contributes to our professionalism.

The product makes many organizational matters easier. John: “We are very excited about iWRITER and if we have questions, the customer support department responds immediately. Quick and friendly customer service. iWRITER brings Uticon’s professionalism to a higher level and that, to us, is a valuable addition.”