Working Efficiently in the Dynamic Bread and Pastry Industry

The bakery industry landscape is facing a variety of challenges that often derive from ever-changing demand. Today’s consumers are becoming increasingly health-conscious and require bakery companies to adapt their products regularly. In order to continue to satisfy the consumer, production needs to be both flexible and effective. A high level of competitiveness characterizes the industry, meaning these challenges cannot be ignored, with both retailers and suppliers continuously looking for innovative new products.

Food Safety and Compliance

Food safety is a very delicate and important matter, and this is especially true of companies that produce biological products. With mandatory quality checks, wash-down procedures, product checks, temperature monitoring, and other control processes that are in place, companies aim to uphold a high standard of product quality. Quality control factors like accurate track and tracing and ensuring correct product specifications are required to avoid any penalties from quality inspectors.

Inventory Management and Planning

When a company does not have a well-integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the production and purchasing planning can suffer from inaccurate insights into the real-time data of their inventory. Consequently, this leads to the business missing out on bulk advantages or perhaps even not having sufficient raw materials. But even when all the data is collected into one system, businesses also need the correct data insights to manage their inventories.

Production Processes

Besides inventory management and purchasing planning, the following step in the process - production - also requires real-time data together with tracking and tracing information. This department demands real-time insights into the availability of labor and machines to balance against production orders. Optimizing this process can help bring the costs per product down and provide a boost to profit margins.

(Re)using co- and by-Products

To avoid the risk of food contamination and improve the overall manufacturing processes, companies need a clear plan related to reusing material for future batches. Strict health requirements often mean that companies are not allowed to work with different batches or lots simultaneously - even if they will eventually become one end product batch. Instead, a rework batch needs to be included within the original production order (for example, as setup bills of materials).

Bakery companies of all types and sizes need to overcome these challenges to move to the next level. You can learn more about how our bakery industry-specific ERP solution - Aptean Food & Beverage ERP - can help you get there, now. Reach out to Aptean today.