McCormick & Company is a global leader in flavor. With $4.4 billion in annual sales, the company manufactures, markets and distributes spices, seasoning mixes, condiments and other flavorful products to the entire food industry, including retail outlets, food manufacturers and foodservice businesses.
McCormick’s brands reach consumers in approximately 150 countries and territories globally. Headquartered in Baltimore, MD, the company employs approximately 11,000 people at locations around the world.
Such an immense operation relies on two supply chain models both powered by SAP: a downstream supply chain delivers packaged spices, seasonings, etc. to grocers and store outlets — eventually finding their way to consumers’ shelves — while the upstream or industrial supply chain fulfills the orders of large restaurant chains and food manufacturers who put McCormick flavors into their products.
It was on the industrial side where McCormick evaluated its labeling processes and realized the need for a centralized solution that could keep up with ever-changing, ever-growing requirements and still ensure the fast, accurate printing of more than 500,000 barcode labels a month.
It was on the industrial side where McCormick evaluated its labeling processes and realized the need for a centralized solution that could keep up with ever-changing, ever-growing requirements and still ensure the fast, accurate printing of more than 500,000 barcode labels a month.
It was critical that the new labeling solution be integrated and certified with SAP. That’s our system of record and Loftware’s solution ensures a direct, reliable connection to our SAP system so we know label data is always correct. That’s important for our global business.
Tim Cukr
Senior Business Analyst
Unlike the downstream relationship between manufacturer and grocer — where certain standards are established for the flow of goods and information (e.g., GTINs, SSCC labels, EDI) — the upstream supply chain is more wide open. As such, McCormick must deal with a wide range of customer-specific label requirements. This could include the addition of GS1-128 standardized barcodes and 2D barcodes as well as pallet-level labels to help with traceability. This extensive variability of label data slowed production and required creating and managing literally thousands of custom label templates with no centralized oversight.
Food & beverage is one of the more heavily regulated industries. For McCormick, the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and the UN’s Globally Harmonized System (GHS), in particular, posed a significant challenge to their existing labeling solution. The issue was magnified when having to deal with country-specific regulations. For example, product shipped to Asia required new labeling and companies would only have 30 days to comply. During instances like this, McCormick had product — both imports and exports — held at the border until the right labeling could be applied. This resulted in additional costs and decreased customer service.
Because McCormick lacked a standardized labeling process, plants were left to their own devices in managing and updating label templates. As such, there wasn’t a clearly defined process to make a label change and have it captured globally across the McCormick supply chain. And the use of multiple, decentralized labeling products meant a lack of consistency, which threatened label accuracy and could lead to mislabeling. Also, no standardization meant it wasn’t possible to shift label production from one site to another to avoid any potential business disruption. If the local copy of labeling software failed, the plant could no longer label product, causing a production stoppage.
Even though the labeling project focused initially on McCormick’s U.S. upstream process, the company knew that it had to scale to support additional plants in North America and Europe — including its downstream distribution facilities. The labeling solution needed to support a variety of languages and graphic images for human and machine readable formats. In addition, McCormick wanted a better, more efficient way to work with suppliers and co-packers. The current method of sending pre-printed labels to partners proved costly and error-prone as it was incumbent on the supplier to put the right label on inbound shipments.
Loftware’s cloud-based enterprise labeling solution enabled McCormick to employ its own McCormick Enterprise Labeling Services to optimize labeling and drive significant efficiencies in its supply chain.
Loftware’s enterprise-wide approach allows McCormick to integrate labeling with its existing SAP platform to trigger and execute Production, Receiving and Shipping labels directly from upstream transactions. This eliminates the need to manually replicate data from one system to the next and, more importantly, ensures end-to-end label accuracy. McCormick benefits from standardized, automated labeling that draws from vital data sources, while eliminating the need to train users on a new system.
