Dairy.com Offers New Procurement Tool

With the help of an innovative new solution from Dairy.com, two major milk buyers are taking the guesswork out of their milk sourcing. Dean Foods and Kraft Foods, in partnership with many milk suppliers, have rolled out Dairy. com's Collaborative Milk Scheduling [CMS] solution to nearly 50 plants and the excitement is growing as they have begun to see greater efficiency, control and collaboration.

"Milk buyers know the nightmare of pulling together shrink and quality data," says Mike McCully, associate dir. of dairy procurement for Kraft Foods. "Information that used to take several hours or days to obtain is now retrievable in seconds. Obviously, this enables us to better manage quality and shrink; and, because the information is shared with my suppliers, they are often working on the issues before we even raise them."

Over the next few months Dean and Kraft will implement CMS at all of their plants. Being browser-based, no special hardware or software is required so implementation is fast and easy compared with traditional software solutions.

Dairy.com currently tracks over 50 different weights, tests and quality attributes. Whether an operator has one plant or a hundred-and-one the solution saves time and money. In the past few years

Dairy.com has brought a number of solutions to market that have become mainstays for the industry, including spot and forward contract trading and scheduling exchanges for cream, condensed skim, cheese, NFDM, transportation and a variety of other dairy commodities. Dairy.com has also delivered CMS Dispatch for optimizing farm-to-plant milk movements, and DairyPay, the first Internet-based producer payroll solution. Its DairyCareers unit, features more than 2,000 online profiles of dairy professionals, for staff recruiting for the dairy industry. For more information visit www.dairy.com.