Ensuring Optimal International Operations for Food and Beverage Enterprises with ERP

The sprawling supply chains and geographical distance between facilities of food and beverage enterprises can lead to complications if your organization isn’t adequately prepared to handle the challenges that come with such large-scale operations.

This is particularly true for companies conducting trade internationally, as differing regulations, currencies, languages and customs can lead to lines getting crossed and expectations left unfulfilled. To be as prepared as possible to confront these concerns, you need the right technology—industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

By ensuring that your food and beverage business has the tools to function efficiently and effectively around the globe, an ERP system can act as your future-proof foundation. Let’s take a look at five of your most important considerations and how ERP systems facilitate streamlined and optimized processes for even the largest of enterprises.

1. Traceability

Public health agencies and consumers alike demand traceability and transparency from food and beverage businesses today. The industry has responded accordingly, with the food traceability market expected to hit $18.5 billion by 2023, and as such, it needs to be among your top priorities as you expand internationally.

Food ERP platforms greatly simplify the process of collecting traceability data, relieving your employees of the burden of logging important information and instead automating the data capture process. All the important facts and figures are recorded, including:

• Country of origin

• Freshness ranges and expiration dates

• Variety

• Weight and/or volume

• Grade

• Quantity

Keep in mind that it’s not enough for a system to track just forward or backward along your supply chain—it needs to trace bi-directionally and update at all critical tracking points along the way. Purpose-built solutions like Aptean Food & Beverage ERP Enterprise Edition have just such functionality, covering you every step of the way.

2. Compliance

Food safety regulations are becoming more exacting and demanding, and for good reason. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that contaminated food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemicals can cause more than 200 different diseases.

Of course, when your facilities and products are in multiple countries, that makes your task of staying compliant all the more difficult, as you’re dealing with different sets of standards based on the situation at hand. Staying informed and vigilant while making sure all best practices are followed is tough even in small settings, but food ERP solutions have the features to make this tall task doable even for large enterprises like yours.

By automating your compliance checks, the system will ensure that all proper procedures are carried out and issues are flagged as soon as possible. Advanced food and beverage platforms like Aptean Food & Beverage ERP are also built to accommodate many different sets of rules and regulations and can thus account for the nuanced differences in requirements from region to region.

3. Language and Currency Conversion

The necessity of accounting for differences in language and currency around the world is pretty plain, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for large food and beverage businesses like yours. Because hiring translators and converting monetary units by hand would obviously be an impractical approach, you need to employ technology built for these purposes.

ERP for food and beverage enterprises come equipped with the tools it takes to get this job done. With multiple language settings, you can make sure that all interested parties are on the same page and understand where they fit into the process.

Switching between currencies is likewise super simple. It all happens automatically within the system and can be toggled at will so that your finances make sense to whomever on your team needs to review them. And of course, this also greatly facilitates billing and purchasing in several different countries at once.

4. Inventory Management

When your locations are all around the world, knowing what you have, where it is and what condition it’s in can become problematic. Spreadsheets and written tables are woefully insufficient for this purpose—only ERP solutions built for large food and beverage businesses can manage inventory with the level of precision that you require.

With the right system in place, you’ll know down to the lot number where your raw materials and products are and how much stock you have on-hand. That’s critical both for order fulfillment as well as production, as you’ll be apprised of potential shortages before they occur and have the ability to head them off.

Automatic reordering functions like those of Aptean Food & Beverage ERP are an additional safeguard against untimely depletion of ingredients or goods. With our platform, you can set your own threshold at which a request for replenishment is issued immediately.

5. Transportation and Shipment Tracking

Operating on a global level naturally means lots of moving parts, including inbound shipments of raw materials and outbound deliveries of finished goods. Knowing where your products are is vital for keeping your processes humming along and your customers satisfied, so this is not an area in which you can simply rely on standard shipping and transportation solutions and hope for the best.

That’s why you need to take control of your tracking with tools designed specifically for the purpose and capable of scaling to your worldwide supply lines. Food industry ERP platforms not only collect all pertinent information at each stop in the journey—they also allow users to specify how your items should be stored when in transit, including the appropriate packaging and temperature controls.

Aptean Food & Beverage ERP’s transportation module can even generate the documentation required for crossing borders based on location. Having a truck held up or a boat stuck at the loading dock won’t be a concern when drivers and other haulage personnel can use their connected mobile devices to access the system and retrieve the forms they need.

Be on the Cutting Edge with Aptean

Running an international food and beverage enterprise can get unwieldly and frustrating without the right tools in your belt. Implementing a food-specific ERP solution can simplify the matter elegantly, giving you the confidence and agility to operate at a high level even when your locations are distant and your routes criss-cross the map.

As a solutions provider, Aptean takes seriously the matter of designing systems that truly suit the nuanced sectors in which our clients operate. We have the know-how, too, with decades of food and beverage industry experience and extensive knowledge of best practices that continue to guide the development of our platforms.

We also offer flexibility, with full cloud deployment a popular choice among customers that want to maximize accessibility and reliability. With redundant servers to ensure optimum uptime, automatically applied updates and dependable 24/7 support from our IT professionals, your business will have the support it needs to excel in the marketplace.

Curious to hear more about how our own industry-specific food and beverage solution, Aptean Food & Beverage ERP, can boost your large food and beverage enterprise to the next level? Reach out to us today.