The revenue in the Food & Beverages segment expected to amount the US $76,082m in 2020 alongside shows an annual growth rate of 8.4%, resulting in a market volume of US$104,944m by 2024.
The fastest-growing food industry with increasing user penetration is facing bigger challenges about food quality, safety conditions, and cost reduction. The food and beverage manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to meet the changing customer demands, maintain a pace with innovations, and comply with regulations along with low-margins and quickly perishable products. It’s disastrous.
The food and beverage manufacturers need visibility and control over manufacturing processes and operations to ensure minimum downtime, maintain product quality, and serve the customers up-to-standards. The traditional pen-and-paper based approach or small accounting software is no longer enough to meet the transparency, traceability, and real-time data needs of modern customers.
The cloud ERP is the best solution that solves the technology needs of the manufacturers and becomes the next frontier of growth. The food and beverage ERP software fill the gaps that traditional software can’t with an integrated and automated solution. It helps manufacturers to serve the responsibilities related to perishable product manufacturing, packaging and labelling, shipping, quality maintenance, and others by connecting the information at various key points from production to the supply chain.
Let’s discuss in detail the benefits that food and beverage companies reap through cloud ERP implementation:
- Increase visibility into manufacturing operations
ERP system for food industry as an all-encompassing solution provides the manufacturing operations data to the business management in real-time, which means the management can continuously review the operations performance, check the quality and regulatory compliance adherence, and resolve the issues proactively when any malfunctioning or leak is detected.
The holistic view of operations also helps in reducing operational cost as the cloud ERP takes off the heavy work from the shoulders of IT resources, which they can invest in reducing waste, improving product quality, and increasing output.
- Flawless tracking
For the manufacturing business, lot traceability is very important that includes tracking the ‘lot information’ referencing the ingredients coming from the supplier for the final product processing and the products reaching to the customers. The precise tracking of the products in the form of lots, packages, or bins as they move in the supply chain helps in swiftly reacting to quality issues and avoiding recalls without much back-and-forth.
ERP for food industry facilitates lot traceability functionality with complete tracking management and the ability to access detailed data, including supply chain, manufacturing, inspection, and usage, which allow the sales reps to identify the source name, lot, and allergic content (If any) of the particular ingredient. The data integrity helps in sustaining customer’s trust with the quick response time.
- Recipe control mitigates risks
Managing the food manufacturing data and intricacies is not a work of an average Joe. Neither it can be done manually nor legacy software capable of handling the large quantity and costing of the raw materials in different formats. The management of hundreds of multi-level recipes with various pre-mixes, raw materials, precautions, measures, and instructions is a hard nut to break in. when it comes to finding an allergic content in the lot or recall of an ingredient in a batch recipe, it becomes time-expensive.
The cloud ERP facilitates batch recipe where descriptive technical data, quantity, cost, measurement, and other types of data is stored in a measurable and easy-to-trace format. No matter how extensive the data is, with an ERP solution, one can easily track and identify the ingredient, conversion, and formulation precisely at all times.
- Seamless inventory management
You believe it or not, but inventory levels can be honed towards cent per cent precision. The food and beverage industry greatly suffer in terms of quality and safety issues due to the limited shelf life of ingredients and their insufficient management. The excess or deficient inventory leads to wastage and delay in processing.
The cloud ERP enables inventory optimization with the real-time view into stock levels, demand forecasting (Through Material Requirement Planning (MRP) & Master Production Scheduling (MPS)) and analyzing the market or environmental conditions. The rich insights help in prioritizing the raw material requirements, minimizing the inventory holding cost, and stabilizing the production.
The detailed traceability through ERP that includes shelf-life determination of the ingredients helps in identifying the products or ingredients to be consumed before it expires so that wastage can be reduced. The built-in mechanism sends alerts to the managers when any such product is found on the shelf or inventory.
- Compliance with regulations
The food and beverage is a highly regulated industry where the manufacturers have to comply with the number of regulations and meet the standards before pushing the product out of the gate. Hiring full-time personnel or deploying software that keeps checking the production process is whether keeping up with the compliance or not won’t be an overstatement. The rigorous enforcement of the compliances is that much complex.
Don’t worry! The cloud ERP supporting HACCP (Hazard analysis and critical control points) planning and other regulations mandated by FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) is capable enough to streamline the compliance process and make it as effective as possible. Additionally, the electronic signatures, process flowcharting, process controls, and others help in making production unit culture more preventative safety-oriented without breaking the manufacturer’s back.
Takeaway
Owning and successfully running the food and beverages company is no child’s play. The end number of challenges is linked to every operation and process of the manufacturing unit. All of them can be resolved with an investment in the right software. The cloud-based food-specific ERP system is a powerful solution that’s designed to serve the needs of modern businesses from the top (business management) to toe (Plant floor) with an integrated real-time view into data. Additionally, it plays a key role in diminishing costs, streamlining processes, and enhancing customer satisfaction.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg. You get a lot when you dig deeper inside the blog. Still, unsure? Connect with our business consultants to get your existing system audited and explore how the ERP software will improve it.