ENSURING UNIFORM FRUIT QUALITY

By: Lalisa Cruz

Challenge

In my last employment, I worked in a start-up food manufacturer in Metro Manila.  I was the sole R&D  personnel in that company, and part of my job was sourcing suppliers of fresh fruits.  Having no prior  experience with procuring fruits, it was a huge challenge for me to find a good, reputable supplier to  transact business with.  As soon as I was able to find a few good ones, the bigger challenge for me was to  ensure that the quality of the fruits is uniform among the suppliers I found.

Selection

I selected the storytelling tool for this particular challenge because I believe that it is the best tool in  obtaining the relevant information I seek.  Since the challenge was for me to ensure that the quality of  fruits is uniform among the suppliers, I had to know the postharvest processes that each of the suppliers  employ.

Application

I talked to the suppliers individually.  In a casual manner, I was able to obtain non-proprietary information  from them through the storytelling tool.  They shared with me their postharvest processes and from there,  I found what specific processes produced the best quality fruits.  As such, I was able to determine the  particular supplier to use as benchmark.  With the supplier’s express consent, our company adopted these  practices as subsequent process steps for those lower quality fruits coming from other suppliers in order  that all the fruits have uniform quality.

Insight

This tool effectively improved the uniformity of the quality of fruits.  From the experience of using this  tool, I was able to gain the following insights: (1) storytelling is as effective as objective approaches; (2)  storytelling gives us relevant baseline information which we can work our improvements from; and (3)  design thinking, in general, utilizes the lean six sigma approach.

Approach

I wouldn’t use any other tool in this scenario because the suppliers’ postharvest processes are internal to  them, and so it is only through storytelling that they are able to share such information with people  outside their organization.

