Van’s Kitchen is a family-owned, food processing company that was founded in 1986 by Vietnamese immigrants, Kim and Van Nguyen.  Van’s has 100 employees and they do approximately $35m in annual sales out of their production facility in Dallas Texas, growing at 30% year-on-year.

Van’s primarily makes eggrolls and oriental food for over 5,000 convenience, grocery and retail outlets across the United States, including Walmart, Krogers and Love’s.

Being a food processor, the company is certified to SQF Level 3 and conducts regular GMP Audits, including tracking both internal/external deviations and consumer/client incidents.  They also conduct numerous sensory tests on a daily basis, validate all suppliers and inspect incoming raw materials.

In 2020, David Cline, Van’s Kitchen’s Chief Operating Officer, was looking to make sense of their increasingly disparate quality management system.  Each function was being managed in multiple different Excel, Access and hard copy records, resulting in the following problems:

• Client/consumer deviations were taking over 23 days to close and involved considerable management and employee bandwidth.
• 45% of internal deviations were not being closed properly at all.
• Impossible to drive accountability across different collaborating teams.
• People wasted time a lot of time trying to tie different systems together.
• Hard to get visibility into the quality processes and data.
• Difficult to retrieve data and prepare for management and other reviews.
• Low engagement between teams needed to complete quality processes, especially preventative actions.
• Too much daily firefighting resulting in there being no time to spend on longer term strategic objectives.