Just about a week ago, I alerted Supply Chain Matters readers to the ongoing investigation by the U.S. Center for Disease Control of a human outbreak of infection due to Salmonella serotype Typhimurium. At the time, 388 persons were identified as sickened, with ongoing investigations from multiple agencies to determine the cause. As of today, the number of reported sick has risen to 430, and five deaths have been reported across three states (Idaho, Minnesota, and Virginia).

It has not taken long to now identify the potential cause of this outbreak linked to peanut butter.  Virginia based Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), which distributes its peanut butter in bulk to institutions, private label food companies, and other food producers, issued a nationwide recall on January 13^th for 21 lots of peanut butter made since July 1 at its plant located in Blakely Georgia.  PCA utilizes the brand Parnell’s Pride in its institutional products, and is also sold by the King Nut Company under the name of King Nut, An open container of King Nut peanut butter in a Minnesota long-term care facility was found to contain the strain of salmonella.

While FDA and media reports continue to stress that none of the recalled peanut butter is sold to end consumers in retail stores, the implications of the potential contamination will echo through various food production supply chains, and indirectly impact consumers.  The first indicator is that The Kellogg Company announced a precautionary hold of the sale of a variety of its Austin and Keebler branded peanut butter cracker  sandwiches.  Consumers and retail stores are being asked to hold onto the Kellogg products, but not eat them, until the investigation is complete.

We need to applaud PCA and King Nut for their prompt and proactive actions in voluntarily recalling their institutional products.  I especially applaud Kellogg for taking bold action to not only protect consumers, but proactively respond to a supply chain risk situation.  Crisis what-if, and business continuity planning are important tenets of an effective supply chain risk management plan.  This ongoing situation is yet another opportunity to observe these plans in action.  Other consumer product companies utilizing peanut butter or paste should focus upstream and proactively act.  Consumers and customers should be your first priority.

Bob Ferrari

It is my sincere pleasure to introduce my readers to our first 2009 sponsor of Supply Chain Matters, Kinaxis. I’ve had the opportunity to follow this company since its inception as a software vendor named Webplan in the late nineties.  At the time, the company founders recognized a glaring need in supply chain planning, namely that as more and more high tech manufacturers were outsourcing production to globally-based contract manufacturers, traditional MRP planning cycles could not quickly and adequately plan external planning requirements.  The fact that its original customer base resided in the high tech industry brought a set of application design principles reflecting supply chain performance predicated on how fast and how effective these companies could respond to a rapidly changing set of demand or supply events. A remarkable set of success stories and a prestigious customer base have occurred since that time.

A testament to its technology is that Kinaxis has now grown its customer base beyond  just its high tech vertical roots.  Named customers such as Avaya, Cisco, Jabil, Research In Motion (RIM), and Teradyne, are now joined by other industry players including Casio, Cannodale Bicycle, General Electric Aviation, MTD, Nikon, and Raytheon, among others.

The Kinaxis RapidResponse technology  that is available today is the result of many years of functional improvements, but still relies on a core principle of rapid planning and ease-of-use among the many functional groups that need to collaboratively perform supply chain planning and response activities.  The application is available either in a traditional on-premise or on-demand hosting alternative. Its strengths lie in concurrently planning supply chain wide production operations among globally sourced operations.  RapidResponse elegantly integrates data from existing ERP or supply chain systems, monitors real-time customer demand, and enables key individuals with the ability to run various scenarios of appropriate response.  Users are alerted to unexpected events much sooner, and can respond to exceptions in a much more timely manner. Earlier this year, Kinaxis augmented its capabilities with the release of new demand management functionality to support the challenges faced in near-term operational  changes that typically occur in a sales and operations planning (S&OP) planning process.

I am very pleased to have Kinaxis included as a sponsor of Supply Chain Matters and look forward to a continued joint collaboration of thought leadership and commentary. If your organization is in need of extended supply chain visibility and response capability that can be implemented in a very timely manner, I would recommend that you place Kinaxis on your short list.

 Bob Ferrari