Milk

Supply Chain and Logistics

British Columbia Milk Marketing Board, Alberta Milk, and Dairy Farmers of Manitoba are key players in the milk supply chain in their respective provinces. These organizations manage milk collection from producers and delivery to processors. In 2014, they formed a partnership to set up a common information system to gather data on milk collection and transportation across the three provinces. However, due to distinct provincial requirements and regulations, each had to maintain its own proprietary version of the system with significant customizations.

Furthermore, the technology on which the system was based eventually became obsolete and was no longer supported, posing reliability and security issues that exposed the entire dairy industry to unacceptable risks. The organizations were faced with the inevitability of replacing this mission-critical system. They called on Spiria to help them achieve their goal of designing and implementing a new, single enterprise mobility platform based on modern technology, robust, and scalable.

The Background

Dairy haulers are responsible for collecting the raw milk from farms and delivering it to processors. In addition to milk transport, they perform several related tasks such as quality assessment of the raw milk, temperature control, recording of collected quantities, sampling, and cleaning the equipment after delivery. They use a mobile scanning device that records all data related to milk collection, quality metrics and delivery. Gathering this data and ensuring its reliability are critical steps, both for product traceability and quality but also for invoicing processors and paying producers.

The Solution

The new enterprise mobility platform consists of three parts:

A mobile application on the hauler’s device to record and transmit data;
A web application for managers that serves as a dashboard to check the devices’ position on their routes in real-time and to verify the collected data;
An integration module that checks and consolidates the gathered data before sending it to the accounting systems specific to each province.

The system’s complete overhaul was an opportunity to start from scratch, to streamline the three provinces’ requirements and to improve users’ experience. The success of a project of this magnitude, on a tight deadline and with different stakeholders each having specific needs, required a thorough analysis to draw up a reliable and detailed roadmap. Once business and software requirements, technical architecture, interface design, project management and quality assurance strategy were identified, development of the system’s different parts went without a hitch using the classic sprint cycle. The process was crowned with a solid quality assurance program, user acceptance testing cycles, field trials, production of a comprehensive user manual, and user training.

The Services

Discovery process
User experience design (UX)
User interface design (UI)
Prototyping
Mobile application development
Web application development
Data integration and migration
Third-party vendor integration
Usability testing
Quality assurance and automated testing
Legacy system decommissioning
User manual creation
User training
Support and maintenance

The Results

On the appointed date agreed upon 18 months prior and within budget, haulers in the three provinces were equipped with the new system and trained in its use. Thanks to the new mobile application’s reliability and usability, they feel better able to carry out their daily operations. Managers can follow the milk collection in real time, and they have confidence in the gathered data. The three provincial organizations now enjoy an enterprise mobile platform that is up-to-date, user-friendly, bug-free, secure and scalable, adaptable to future business needs, and all this supported by a solid and proactive partner. The project’s success is due in large part to the amazing team effort in which each stakeholder, both on the client-side and at Spiria, worked collaboratively with a common goal.

Spiria is a creative, critical thinking partner that gave us a solution on time, on budget, and it achieved the outcomes we needed.

Freda Molenkamp-Oudman

General Manager

Alberta Milk

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Milk

The Background

The Solution

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