Key Features of ERP Software for Cosmetics and Personal Care That Your Business Needs

If you work in the cosmetics and personal care product industry, you’ve almost certainly heard the phrase “digital transformation” many times over at this point. Some think of it as the process of going paperless, but the truth is that it can be much more significant and beneficial for your business’s future if you approach the initiative the right way.

But how do you map out your journey and take the right steps to maximize your chances of long-term success in this endeavor? The first matter to attend to is finding a technological solution that can act as an organization-wide foundation, a “single source of truth”—and for that, there’s nothing better than an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

To more fully explore just what makes ERP platforms for cosmetics and personal care product companies so well-suited to driving holistic improvement, let’s dive into their key features and how they can help you tackle your toughest operational challenges.

Formula Management

At the end of the day, your business will be judged first and foremost on its products. They should consistently meet, if not exceed, consumers’ expectations and have strong appeal for your target demographics. In order to achieve that goal, it’s critical that you get the formulas for them just right.

An ERP built for the cosmetics and personal care industry will provide you with the tools you need to accomplish that task. By maintaining and updating your ingredient quantities, specifying manufacturing processes and applying them all via a fully configurable digital backend, your staff will be able to fine-tune all parameters and reliably produce the goods that your customers are counting on.

Inventory Control

Speaking of products, you need raw materials to make them. And in a setting as complicated and busy as a manufacturing facility, you need to have a firm understanding of what you have and where it’s stored at all times in order to execute your daily plans efficiently and effectively.

That’s why inventory control is so crucial for cosmetics and personal care companies like yours. With a purpose-built ERP solution on your side, you’ll know at a glance where your stock levels stand and can even implement automatic reordering when supplies run low so that you never experience a shortage in crunch time.

Research and Development

Innovation is occurring all the time in the cosmetics and personal care market, and if your organization wants to keep pace with the rapid rate of change and engage in exploration of new territory, you’ll need to devote time, money and energy to research and development (R&D). Of course, without the right features to facilitate these procedures, even the most qualified teams’ efforts can go for naught.

Enter ERP systems—or, more specifically, the R&D functions that they offer. By providing a “sandbox” environment for experimentation and iteration, your product experts will be able to hone their ideas into viable offerings or maybe even the latest new hot item in the makeup or hygiene world.

Lot Tracking

No matter how careful your personnel are and clean your facilities may be, contaminations and product recalls come with the territory of operating in the cosmetics and personal care product space. For that reason—as well as the increasingly stringent government requirements for traceability—it’s vital that you have robust lot tracking capabilities at your disposal.

ERP software for cosmetics and personal care shine here too, capturing key raw material and product information at each stage of the supply chain electronically and updating your database in real-time. And by integrating with handheld barcode scanners and other connected devices, you can even automate parts of the process, streamlining and simplifying what could otherwise be a labor-intensive exercise.

Quality and Compliance Assurance

We mentioned previously just how important your products are for your brand, and only with consistently excellent quality will you build customer loyalty and a good reputation among retailers and shoppers. And in addition to those demands that consumers have, there are also regulatory bodies—like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada and the European Commission—to answer to.

All of this underscores just how crucial good quality and compliance assurance procedures are for your cosmetics and personal care products business. An ERP tailored to your industry will come with the functionalities you need to ensure that everything rolling off your lines is up to snuff while helping to instill best practices and employing on-screen alerts to make sure crucial checks are never missed.

The Advantages of Choosing Aptean

This likely all sounds well and good, but even just a cursory search will yield dozens upon dozens of ERP offerings that claim to be an “all-in-one” solution for companies of every shape and size. Some may even boast the features we listed above—but unless the system was designed specifically for cosmetics and personal care products companies, you could find that it lacks critical functionalities for the issues you face.

Our product, Aptean Process Manufacturing ERP software for cosmetics and personal care, is designed with features based on our teams’ decades of collective experience. Our in-depth knowledge of the market and the most common pitfalls faced by manufacturers in the space has driven the creation of a product that stacks up with the best you can find today.

What’s more, we’re here to answer any and all questions you might have about the actual deployment of an ERP solution and what your roadmap to rollout would look like. The passionate and experienced professionals at Aptean can guide you along the way and act as partners for your organization in seeing the implementation through.

When you’re ready to hear more about Aptean Process Manufacturing ERP and how it can help drive the digital transformation of your cosmetics and personal care business, be sure to contact us. We also offer personalized demos for those who want to see the solution in action.