As the industry demands new and better data systems for compliance, traceability and transparency, one organization has met the challenge. Enter Nicholas Pasculli and Sam Spadoni of TMD Tech Solutions.

“We work with a wide variety of clients on things like websites, marketing materials, and so on and we end up needing all types of information in the process,” said Spadoni, director of business development with the company. “Invariably the client needs to gather all this up and get it to us for the project.”

Spidoni said that often a client will send over an excel sheet, or worse two or three different sheets from different departments, all with conflicting data sets. “We started thinking there’s gotta be a better way to help bring people into the future.”

Pasculli, president and CEO of TMD expanded on this: “Sometimes the sales department would have a different set of information than production or quality assurance or another department. There is often a lot of conflicting information with multiple layers all over the place and no central repository for that data within a company.”

According to Pasculli, TMD was approached by a major grower-shipper on California’s Central Coast with a challenge related to quality assurance: providing accurate and detailed information to their customers based on QA specs. In the discovery process it came to light that there was a tie in with other departments within that company; they challenged TMD to develop a platform to help eliminate inconsistencies company-wide, and SpecFresh was born. “That was the first iteration of the platform,” he said. “One of the offshoot benefits of going through the process with us was that it made it easier for the company to find the flaws in their own information systems.”

While the software helps to remove internal silos, it also has the ability to provide the customer the information they need in order to help marketers sell more and get their product into distribution channels quicker. “It saves a tremendous amount of time,” said Pasculli. “When I started in the produce business over 30 years ago, if a customer wanted specific product spec information, you couldn't just give them that information, you’d have to track it down somewhere in the company, meaning you’d have to get back to them after you found it.”

How long will it take a sales rep to bet back to the customer? It could take 30 minutes or 30 hours depending on how organized the information is. The nightmare situation being that one person is the keeper of that data and unreachable. But in this regard, the salesperson can look up the product with SpecFresh within seconds and have that info right in front of them.

“It’s important to consider that in most organizations, when a produce buyer is looking for this information and calls a salesperson, the salesperson isn’t making one phone call to find and dig it up,” added Spadoni. “He’s typically calling two or more different departments for that information, the whole process ends up snowballing. Having all this in a cloud-based system and being able to access it from anywhere is a major advantage. It has the ability to create sales sheets with the click of a button and to send them directly to the buyer.”

“The system also has the ability to give customers access to the data as well,” said Spadoni. It’s very simple and user-friendly with filters, allowing you to limit access by SKU, by category; it gets very granular.”

Spadoni said that SpecFresh a system that can provide value right out of the box, but is also amenable to integrations with other APIs a company may be using as well as ecommerce functionality for direct to consumer sales.

“The architecture is already in place,” said Spadoni, “and the time is right for this product. At every conference, every roundtable, you hear the same thing over and over again, the trade wants transparency they want access to information, and SpecFresh by TMD Tech Solutions answers the call.”