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From Paprika to PLM
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I cook. I cook all kinds of food. I’m always looking for something new, something different and something with a different flavor.
This is a good thing for my family and friends who are only too-willing to be my next taste-tester. But, about 2 years ago I came to the realization that I had a problem. My search for recipes created a database of information that became unmanageable.
Maybe you can relate. I had stacks of papers separated out into piles. One pile for Mexican, one pile for Oriental, one pile for BBQ, etc. The piles were subdivided by sticky notes for soup, appetizers, main-course or desserts. I had magazines and cook books too. I created a separate excel spread sheet to catalog the recipes in the magazines and cook books. Then there was the electronic data. In many ways, it was harder to search the electronic data because it was not all in the same format and came from a variety of sources. Does this sound familiar at all?
Cooking became more about finding the recipe than actually cooking. Sometimes I’d search for a recipe I knew I had but couldn’t find (I had one recopied for pulled-chicken BBQ that I actually had seven (7) copies of the same recipe). If I couldn’t find a particular recipe I’d try to recreate to from memory, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. I found myself with about 25/30 recipes that I would cycle through because it was too hard to find the buried tasty treasures.
I had plans to create a master file for everything but once everything was spread out on my dining room table (with all the leaves in it seats about 10 people) I realized my problem was too big for this approach.
I love my electronic gadgets, I know there had to be something out there…enter Paprika! Paprika became my epicurean PLM.
The first priority was my legacy data, the paper recipes. With Paprika I could enter them manually through their very user-friendly UI or I could search for them on the web and with 1-click I could import them into Paprika. I could add notes, make modifications and revisions and save them as new recipes, instead of having a 3x5 cards with scribbles all of it.
Paprika gave my platform independence, it didn’t matter if I was on my iPad, desktop of smartphone; I had access to everything through Paprika and their cloud-based data base. I could easily navigate my recipe (BOM) and mark what I had in stock or what I needed to procure and send the procurement list to my email so I had it handy when I was at the store. Actually, I usually sent it to my sourcing agent, my wife.
I began to tell others about Paprika and I created a community of friends who all collaborate (exchange recipes) through Paprika. We can add notes, rate the recipe as well as scale the recipe for required production run (how many people are coming over tonight?!?!).
All my paper is gone, everything is in Paprika. I’ve created categories (metadata) to search easily and find exactly what I’m in the mood for. I can even plan as far ahead as I please by adding recipes to the calendar days, weeks or months ahead. This is a great feature for the high-demand periods (Holidays).
Better data management can be a good thing at an individual level. When you expand it to a team or the entire enterprise it’s an even better thing. My personal productivity in the kitchen increased tremendously, image your whole company being able to search through the MOUNTAIN of data at your company to extract the critical information required to make better business decisions.
That’s what we do at Saratech, we help you leverage your people and data to make better products. Let us help you get your company REALLY cooking! Contact me to learn more!
It seems only fair that I include a recipe so here you go. This time of the year is “Soup Sunday” in my house, this is one of our favorites…