The Pressure Is Rising: How Food Manufacturers Ensure Quality, Reduce Costs and Meet Customer Demands

Today’s food and beverage manufacturers are facing deeper challenges around consumer demand. People want transparency into the manufacturing and distribution process, and it’s becoming increasingly important that the process be environmentally friendly, sustainable and energy conscious. These expectations are on top of ever-present economic demands: ensure quality while reducing cost.

The fast-paced nature of the industry, accompanied by constantly changing market demands, forces food manufacturers into firefighting mode. Your focus should be on providing impeccable service, but as the business grows and becomes more complex, tried and true technology that once managed your processes may not work so well anymore. Sometimes, food manufacturers may not realize just how costly outdated methods are.

If it’s time to update your process management technology, consider shifting to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to manage three of your top pressures: ensuring quality, reducing cost and meeting customer demand.

Ensure quality

Food and beverage manufacturers want to produce quality products and provide impeccable service to their customers. Your customers want products they can trust and a company they can rely on.

The challenge: food and beverage manufacturers have responsibilities unique to perishable products. They must adhere to regulations, labeling and packaging requirements, and safety precautions. If you’re manufacturing a variety of products, keeping the requirements for each SKU straight can be a time-consuming and error-prone task – especially using a manual process like pen-and-paper.

Here a food-specific ERP could be invaluable. You can consolidate information around each of your products into one easy-to-use system, helping you better track expiration dates and label requirements to ensure regulatory compliance. You can also identify any tainted ingredients before you release your products to stores – and afterward as well if any recalls should arise. Today’s technology allows for end-to-end asset tracking and helps mitigate risk as you follow products from field to factory to fork.

Cut costs

Investing in technology can provide food and beverage manufacturers the tools they need to not only ensure food safety and high quality to consumers but also cut costs.

A food-specific ERP provides real-time visibility into your data, allowing you to understand which products are in demand and stock the ingredients you need – while cutting down on those you don’t. You can also track expiration dates and ensure all ingredients are used before they’re no longer good, reducing food waste.

Food manufacturers also often struggle to reduce the costs involved in the supply chain – a complex process involving multiple stops before the product reaches shelves. A food-specific ERP helps you understand where your products are at all times. When there’s a bottleneck in the supply chain, an ERP helps you understand the impact of breakdowns, find alternate ways to keep production moving and fix the issue for future production.

Meet customer demand

Customer demand isn’t only about product availability – it’s about better products, produced with social responsibility in mind. Customers want to know the journey their food and beverage products take, from the farm through production and to the shelves. Visibility, accuracy and insight into processes are essential in assuring customers their products are healthy, safe and sustainable.

A food-specific ERP makes it easier for all parties to understand what products are selling (and what aren’t), ensuring the items customers want are available to meet demand. It also simplifies data management, allowing you to keep customers informed on production processes and reach a new level of transparency.

JustFood ERP addresses these challenges – and more

For food and beverage manufacturers looking to simplify product management, JustFood ERP provides real-time data and can bridge gaps in ways that traditional pen-and-paper methods cannot.

JustFood is a food-specific ERP designed to manage the movement and storage of material from the moment it arrives at your facility until it lands as a finished product in the hands of your distributors and customers. JustFood provides deep visibility to help you improve product quality, reduce costs throughout the supply chain, and keep up with customer demand.

Better manage your food manufacturing operations and gain the freedom to focus on what really matters with JustFood ERP.