Joris: Last month, we launched the GMP+ Platform to support our community in managing all their GMP+ activities. It began 2 and a half years ago, and throughout has been driven by the needs and feedback of the community who will use it every day.
Max: Our work together was driven by GMP+ International's belief in partnership, not just between our organisations but also with the connected community. This resonated with our own values as Online Department in empathising with the end-users and involving them in the design process and development of the new GMP+ Platform. Together we worked on creating a more human and meaningful experience.
Joris: It has been a huge team effort, and we believe we’ve built something that can really support the GMP+ Community.
Working in partnership
Joris: GMP+ International’s systems have contributed to a safer and more sustainable animal feed industry for three decades. But prior to when we started this project, we were already hearing feedback from the community about our website and portal that it was sometimes difficult to use. It was hard to find what you needed, documents were difficult to access, and the data and insights we had gathered over the years were not yet benefitting the community. That made us want to do something about our services as a whole. We wanted the user to have a more intuitive and seamless experience.
Max: Our assignment was to develop a user-friendly, fast, safe and scalable open-source platform based upon proven technology. With this new platform, end-users & the GMP+ team are serviced with an easy to use system and scalable platform that fulfils future needs and delivers data insights that help achieve business goals. This means GMP+ can work towards safe and sustainable feed with a digital and data-driven backbone. In order to achieve this, we designed the platform with the end-user in mind and worked based on validated needs and wishes through feedback from the community.
Joris: The platform has two parts, the GMP+ website, and a log-in area for certified companies, Registered Consultants, Certification Bodies, and partners. Platform-specialist Xuntos has built the new GMP+ platform, based on the designs from Online Department. They have built the platform to offer our users the seamless experience between our website and login-environment with contemporary database technology. With their expertise and smart solutions, we’re able to make changes and adapt to future user-needs. We knew that using our databases, scheme documents, and systems was sometimes taking too much time to get the results people needed. Things like using static PDF documents makes translations challenging, especially for a global scheme. But we needed to test our assumptions, and look at the whole system, not just to individual parts.
Max: We started off by mapping the assumptions of the GMP+ team and spending time to get to know the end-users to validate them. In order to do so we conducted multiple interviews with users of the existing platform from German, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands among many other countries involved in the GMP+ Community. By validating these assumptions, we could work on creating solutions for problems users were experiencing, taking away barriers they ran into, and optimising user-flows within the platform.
User-friendly
Joris: With end users shaping our thinking, we were able to build solutions. Supported by our partners at Xuntos who made the data systems work behind the scenes, so the platform would have a better structure of the data. We have collected years of data from our community, and users can access this information. This means you can see not only risk assessment documents, but all the associated information to connect the dots to create a holistic database for users to work with. You can now look at product analysis over time; trends and hazards, contextualised with anonymised data from the rest of the community. With this data you can adjust your risk management system based on the history of the community data. Other schemes don’t have this level of deep-dive analysis on hazards and risk analyses.
Max: Now, instead of static PDFs, all scheme documents are accessible in a web browser in multiple standard languages, and users are also able to automatically translate them with widely available translation tools – a much more user-friendly solution for a growing international scheme. This also makes searching and finding the information you need easier and more efficient. GMP+ had already received feedback that some users found it difficult to find the information they needed, which also came up again in the interviews we conducted. I remember one person mentioning that they found that the information was scattered across many different places. Now, companies are finding and accessing the information they need much more easily, and diving into different layers of information has become simpler and more straightforward.
Joris: Users can soon add bookmarks and favourites, so if you work with certain documents or products, you can pin those to your dashboard to make it easier for you to access your most-used items. The feedback on the new platform has been fantastic. And overall, the average usability scores have shot up from 56.5% to 80%. That makes the experience for our community much more seamless.
Speak up
Joris: There’s more still to come. Starting 3 March we will launch our version-compare feature, along with new scheme documents that include updates from 2024 . If a requirement changes, users can see exactly what has changed, but also the context. When you open one of our scheme documents behind the login, you will be able to easily see what updates have been made within that specific area of the document, instead of having to cross-reference with other static documents.
Max: From my experience, I hope the GMP+ Community sees and knows that sharing their knowledge, feedback and insights with GMP+ can and will make a difference in the way they work. As the real experts in this story, your views help us create better solutions, making you do your work more efficient and productive. This, in turn, contributes to safer and more sustainable feed for animals, and ultimately for us humans.
Joris: We’re not done yet. We’re continuing to add value, make improvements, and that will be ongoing which only makes it more worthwhile to be GMP+ certified. We hope you visit the platform, experience it for yourself, and see what it can do for you.