Product Design

Storing correct information and keeping it up to date is extremely expensive therefor it should be structured in such a way that it can survive the application that originally stored it in and evolve with the application landscape. Retention of basic product information is in most cases not the end goal it should be available for more advanced functions where it can add real value to the most essential process of food companies: Product Development.

Knowledge

We develop knowledge based systems that have the ability to design new products or product variants. By capturing your expert’s knowledge, algorithms and methodologies in a system assures that this is available 24x7 and can be used consistently throughout the whole company. A side benefit is that you have documented explicit knowledge and are more agile as new people can be better trained by the documented knowledge and the new systems and the same is true with job rotation.

Simulation

Having a lot of your company’s knowledge in a central software system makes it possible to use this for product development in-silico. Simulate your product parameters like shelf life, microbial growth and even taste without leaving your desk and thus make real savings on trials and taste panels and have a significant improvement of your time to market.

Optimisation

Being able to simulate in-silico makes it possible to take the next step: enter your marketing constraints and optimise and existing product to these constraints and start optimising. A computer will do this without bias and optimise a product with less sugar and the same sweetness even if we humans think that is impossible.

Specification

All of these possibilities above require a lot of master data and actually most of these advanced systems started as materials and formulation information systems. In 1992 we started in de product data management (PDM) area by building a generic specification system and rolled this out around Europe. This has become a standard product that is still actively in use by a number of our customers today to manage specifications.