Overview
In the food and feed industry, ensuring the quality and safety of raw materials is paramount. Our customer, Mars, faced the challenge of predicting emerging raw material risks continuously. Different factors like climate change, COVID, and political instability all brought new risks which required continuous monitoring of external events that could impact raw material safety.  They needed a solution that could provide early warnings of relevant new risks. This is where iComplai comes into play – iComplai is a cutting-edge platform capable of scrutinizing millions of data points to deliver daily insights on emerging raw material risks.

The Challenge
Mars, Incorporated is an American multinational manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products and a provider of animal care services. The company was ranked as the fourth largestprivately held company in the United States by Forbes. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, the company is entirely owned by the Mars family.  
Our customer has a vast network of suppliers, with varying volumes and origins. The challenge was to monitor these suppliers effectively and get alerts if any issues were detected so that they could adjust their suppliers’ HACCP and similar quality control ratings based on the risks associated with the raw materials.
"We were looking for a solution that could provide us with real-time updates on our raw material risks," said Aksana Kastsova, Supplier Quality Assurance and Digital Insights Lead at Mars. "We needed to be able to react quickly to any changes and ensure the safety and quality of our products."

The iComplai Solution
iComplai provided an ideal solution for Mars’ needs. With iComplai, they could monitor their raw material risk and get early warnings when new risks arose. The platform could determine the risks, both known and predicted, of raw materials within 30 seconds.
"The iComplai platform has been a game-changer for us," said Aksana Kastsova, Supplier Quality Assurance and Digital Insights Lead at Mars. "It's like having an extra set of eyes on our supply chain with specific focus on material risks and hazards. We can now monitor our suppliers even more effectively and make informed decisions based on the data."

The Future
Our customer plans to continue using iComplai to monitor their raw material risk and supplier quality. The iComplai data will be rolled out to a user base of 250+ quality assurance experts, in addition to R&D and Regulatory Affairs so they can save time and have better control of the supply chain.
"We see a lot of potential in the iComplai platform," said Aksana Kastsova, Supplier Quality Assurance and Digital Insights Lead at Mars.  "We're looking forward to integrating more of our data and making better use of the machine learning algorithms and additional early warning messages provided by iComplai."