Gerber Ensures Quality Products, Quality Customer Relations with SAS®

Sweet potatoes. Plums. Vegetable chicken dinners. And don't forget rice cereal with bananas. Developing the highest quality and most sought-after baby food on the market has been the driving force at Gerber Products Company since its beginnings in 1928. And today, Gerber depends on SAS software to ensure consistent product quality and to enhance customer relations.

Based in Fremont, Michigan, the Gerber division of Novartis Corp. has expanded from a small home business serving local clients to a global company with three separate production plants and millions of customers worldwide. Its products are labeled in 16 languages and distributed in 80 countries. Gerber produces them all with a dedication to the nutritional health of its young consumer base and the consistent high quality of each product. Enterprise solutions from SAS help Gerber maintain its strict quality standards at each production plant and respond to customer needs in the same timely fashion as founder Sally Gerber did in 1928.

Fast access to consumer complaint data
Gerber's Consumer Response Center receives millions of phone calls every year. Manned with trained customer service representatives, the response center saves a record of each call and stores the information in its corporate data warehouse.

Fewer than 10 percent of these calls are customer complaints, but the Quality Assurance Department must analyze every issue to ensure the company's promise to provide the highest quality baby foods.

Using SAS, Gerber's quality engineers developed a system that extracts daily complaint records from the corporate warehouse and links that data with manufacturing and process-related information. The Consumer Response System (CRS) informs executives of product quality levels and alerts plant supervisors of possible concerns in the manufacturing process.

Rita Rosnick, quality assurance manager, explains how CRS works. "We can go into the system first thing in the morning and see all of our products and all of our complaints categorized by criticality," she says. "We set a threshold limit for number of complaints per manufacturing date and type of product, so if a product has exceeded those thresholds or reached those limits, it will show up on the alert screen." Data for each product in the alert area can then be further explored to determine the root cause of the complaint.

Quality engineers, corporate directors and plant supervisors are some of the many users who access the system for alert notifications and data queries. In the past, most of these users did not have direct access to consumer information. Instead, they had to wait for weekly summary reports and then try to relate that data back to distinct departments or manufacturing processes – an arduous task, to say the least.

"Our SAS-based CRS system has really empowered the users to query and analyze quality data on their own. They can get their data and create their own reports, and it's all up-to-date information," says Rosnick. "They're not dealing with data that's a week old. It's all within a 24-hour period, so they can react to complaints much quicker than they could before."

Executive reporting in a flash
In addition to these on-the-spot queries, the system is used for monthly executive reporting, which helps Gerber adjust strategy and policies according to real customer information. The Quality Assurance Department distributes an executive summary to the company president and to other sales and marketing executives. This report summarizes complaints received within the last month and separates consumer feedback into various categories.

According to Rosnick, the executive summary used to take two full weeks to compile. "One of the goals with this new system was to automate that report. Now we have a module in the system where the graphs are created automatically, combining the current sales data along with the complaint data. So instead of two weeks, it takes just a matter of hours."

Overall, Rosnick says, SAS has provided better quality assurance for Gerber products and helped the company become more aware of consumer needs. "There have been a lot of benefits," she says. "Getting data to people in a more timely manner, making it easier to use, and saving them time."

And in the long run, these savings make it easier for Gerber to ensure that its jars of peas, sweet potatoes and other products are just as fresh as they were in 1928, when Sally Gerber strained them by hand.

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