Building a Business Case for Food and Beverage ERP Software That Shores Up 7 Major Pain Points

1. Building a Business Case for Food and Beverage ERP: Software That Shores Up 7 Major Pain Points There is agreement that enterprise resource planning (ERP) software developed specifically erp for food and beverage industry is a prerequisite. Filled with specific functionality for the different processes and technologies developed to combat the unique challenges of this complicated market, such a solution can be a game changer. This may be measured in terms of how a custom-built ERP system for a food and beverage company is useful. Based on research by Aptean and B2B International, companies using industry-oriented erp software for food industry experienced approximately 39% better revenue growth than companies running non-industry-oriented applications. This sincerely illustrates the potential bottom-line savings you'll realize with an erp for food and beverage manufacturing built specifically for food and beverage operations. But before you make this large an investment, you must build a business case, which enables you to articulate this with other stakeholders and get their approval. This you can do by looking at how a food and beverage ERP system does address major pain points in improving everything from inventory and quality control to reporting and the bedding in of sales. Key issues can be addressed using tools from the food ERP for the industry and improvements measured across the company.

2. Now, let's dig into how this food and beverage erp software for food manufacturing is going to empower the workforce in your business. Let's explain seven main operational areas with relevant features that you will be able to benefit from. 1: Inventory Management With volumes of items your implementation system touches—from receipt of raw materials to shipping of finished goods—you can't afford not to log and analyze your inventory. You will need digitally robust capabilities to thoroughly describe lots, conduct allergen screening, and ensure you can trace lots from origin to destination for recalls and regulatory agencies. The food and beverage ERP will allow for lot and sub-lot management that will provide visibility down to the individual item level of the product so that you can effectively trace every item that goes in and out of your facilities. Product specification tools allow one to reach granularity in setting item specifications, which include allergen concerns and other required disclosures. Also, this drastically reduces the time it takes to maintain your compliance records and product files with its electronic document management (EDM) space. Updated inventory data is there to access at all times; thus, making better decisions to maintain levels, preventing shortages and surpluses. 2: Warehouse Management Food and beverage warehouses can be really busy, fast-paced work environments. You have to keep some semblance of order in a situation that could easily turn chaotic. You can't be bogged down by manual pen-and-paper processes or held back by information silos—and you have to have the visibility into vendor performance to hold your trade partners accountable. The ERP solutions that are tailored to the specific needs of industries can now easily bring in full automation and digitization of record-keeping through handheld barcode scanners. Employees, who would have been otherwise sending and tracking the movement of a product with a simple push of a button or pull of the trigger, will save those seconds for their tasks that are towards the real mission. For instance, an ERP is the common organization-wide platform acting like a "single source of truth," where data is synchronized across all departments, and it provides visibility to key stakeholders. The software has the over/under delivery feature, which allows you to monitor how accurately suppliers fulfill your order and helps you determine if they are meeting your expectations.

3. 3: Production and Shop Floor Management In a food and drink production environment, shop floor time is precious. You need effective planning to ensure you use all your capacity, along with a smooth flow to keep the lines going and avoid waste. Making sure you meet targets and deliver customer orders is money in the bank, so your business is at stake. In this regard, the production scheduling tools of a good food and beverage ERP solution are priceless insofar as they enable your decision-makers to optimize the order and timing of production runs in such a way that output is maximized while change-over time is minimized. Production scenario functionality permits you to set up one primary plan and another as a backup in case you have a material shortage or supply chain disruption. A third important feature is production planning; a good ERP system will alert your shop floor managers to supply-demand imbalances in time to fix the problems and keep your production on track. Advanced food ERP systems, like Aptean Food & Beverage ERP, may even harness historical sales data, seasonality, or emergent trends to create a forecast for future demand that not only may but should be considered reliable. 4: Quality Management and Food Safety Your brand reputation largely depends on the quality and safety of your products. Consumer expectations continue to increase; yours rise, driven by high standards of compliance. Now you have every reason to always be on the lookout for ways to have less of the compromised finished goods, less of the expired ingredient, and less of the exposure to recalls. You will have these inspection status features through your purpose-built supply chain erp beverage industry for the continuous quality and thread safety checks at the points predetermined in your manufacturing processes. Freshness windows can be tracked and transparent, and known centralized quality control tools can be used to identify items that are not up to par. Bi-directional traceability means ERP allows a recall order to be done almost in no time, up and downstream to the origination point and a mention of the location of products that have meandered downstream with just a few clicks. A few steps in the process, such as issuing communications to affected parties, can even be automated to receive results even more quickly.

4. 5: Business Intelligence and Reporting Are you really getting the best out of your data? Potential knowledge abounds. There is no question that your manufacturing performance and sales numbers, among other things, have a lot of information just waiting to be taken advantage of, and without the right tools, getting these detailed, industry-specific metrics that lead to actionable insights is not easy. The best means of getting a fair assurance of the functionalities that truly count for leveraging data in the best possible way would be the implementation of food ERP software with business intelligence (BI). This powerful technology provides the ability to drill down into data right to the root cause of problems dragging performance and, in the process, profit margins for effective results to be realized. A BI application integrated with Aptean Food & Beverage ERP can track more than 500 KPIs—more than 300 fitting specifically for food and beverage organizations—to monitor performance and trends over time. The software's BI module also features scenario-modeling capabilities to help gauge the effect of potential changes beforehand. Such enhancements in respect of a major pain point of a food and beverage ERP relate more to the aspects of inventory and warehouse management, production efficiency, quality control, and data-driven decision-making. An investment in a purpose-built ERP solution for growth and success in the competitive marketplace is strategic.