How a Food and Beverage ERP Can Facilitate Growth for Your Business

Considering the fact that growth is likely one of your food and beverage business’s key goals, you’re going to need solutions that can scale. After all, with more raw materials and finished products moving through your facilities, it’s critical that your systems and processes are optimized to handle larger volumes.

The pace of your operations is also likely to increase, as you’ll have more orders to fulfill, which will put efficiency at a premium. That means that manual procedures and methods of record-keeping will need to make way for fully digital and automated means of managing production and collecting data.

Luckily, industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) software exists to help you accomplish these aims. Whether you look at your digital transformation as a simple matter of “going paperless” or a more holistic, higher-level organizational initiative, such a platform makes the ideal foundation for the future.

Read on to understand the many ways that a food and beverage ERP can help you ramp up effectively and enjoy a successful expansion.

Streamline Your Supply Chain

Your supply chain is the lifeblood of your food and beverage business. It’s crucial that it flows smoothly, especially in periods of growth—nothing puts a cramp on production like a shortage of ingredients, and you’ve got to ensure that sales and deliveries proceed without a hitch in order to maintain both customer satisfaction and a healthy bottom line.

ERP solutions built for the food industry are packed with features that give you greater visibility of important information from a variety of sources, including suppliers, production lines currently in progress and your clients downstream. Here are some good examples:

• From one end of the supply chain to the other, complete bidirectional traceability tools collect and maintain vital material and product details so that you’re fully in the know. These functionalities are also necessary for food safety emergency preparedness, as they facilitate tracking contaminations to their source and initiating the recall process if necessary.

• In the production process, real-time manufacturing metrics give you insight on your results right away, allowing you to make evaluations of your yield to improve processes and reduce waste going forward. Better still, integrations with smart sensors and digital imaging technology can automate critical quality assurance procedures.

• At the distribution and fulfillment stage, full shipment scheduling capabilities give you control over dispatching orders and making sure goods reach their final destination on time and in full. You’ll also be able to factor in any additional costs—like freight and fuel—to get a clearer picture of the profitability of your lines and assess past sales data for demand planning.

These are just a few of the supply chain touchpoints where food ERP systems can have a positive impact. If you’re looking to expand operations and want the experience to be seamless, this is the technology your organization needs.

Ensure Compliance

Few issues can derail your growth like an issue with regulatory compliance. Not only could you face fines or other penalties from the administering government agencies—you also run the risk of damaging your brand reputation in the eyes of consumers.

A dedicated compliance module of an ERP platform built for the food and beverage market can help give you peace of mind that your finished goods are always up to snuff in terms of meeting all applicable standards. What’s more, if you integrate your solution with smart sensors and digital imaging equipment, you can even automate important steps in your quality assurance measures.

Proper labeling—especially when allergens may be involved—is another critical component of maintaining compliance that a food ERP can help you manage. The packaging modules of an advanced system like our purpose-built food and beverage software, Aptean Food & Beverage ERP, allow you to specify all parameters, including labels that disclose crucial information for those with sensitivities and other health concerns.

Sharpen Your Competitive Advantages

In the course of your growth, it will be vital to hold true to what makes your business unique and attractive to potential clients and customers. Your processes may change and evolve as you incorporate new technology and improve upon past models, but you can’t lose sight of those strengths that put your company in a position to succeed in the first place.

That’s why you’ll want to harness the power of ERP features that help you tackle the unique challenges stemming from your model or product segment. These include, but are not limited to:

• Commodity receiving tools that simplify order entry with a clean and intuitive interface, facilitate tracing materials to their origin and calculate net weight automatically

• Recipe and packaging bill of materials (BOM) functions that create separate bills for material groupings, define recipes according to batch sizes and provide better accuracy in determining expected yields, scrap and anticipated losses

• Catch weight management modules that assign values at the lot level, account for your predetermined tolerance ranges and automate the data collection process with connected scales

Other specialized features for consignment tracking, designation of class or grade and batch processing can also prove invaluable for organizations that deal with those tasks on a day-in, day-out basis. With the right food industry ERP, they can all be at your disposal so that your advantages grow stronger in your expansion process.

Integrate Additional Solutions

In the food and beverage industry, ERP systems are undoubtedly the lynchpin for sound modernization efforts, but complementary solutions that can integrate with that central platform also have the potential to drive better outcomes.

For example, a warehouse management system (WMS) can make keeping tabs on your inventory, storage conditions and picking processes a much simpler matter. Likewise, an overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) system can provide data-driven and actionable insights from your factory floor that inform smart, agile decision-making on the fly.

Aptean has a full suite of products beyond our best-in-class food and beverage ERP, all of which can work harmoniously once you have your digital foundation in place. In addition to Aptean WMS and Aptean Process Manufacturing OEE, we also proudly offer Aptean Pay, Aptean Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Aptean Business Intelligence (BI), Aptean Routing and Scheduling and Aptean Proof of Delivery, among others—and they all integrate seamlessly with our ERP offering.

Why Aptean Is the Ideal Technology Partner for Growth

At Aptean, we’ve leveraged decades of food and beverage experience and robust technological know-how to design leading solutions for businesses like yours. We know how important scalability is for companies that want to expand, so we made sure that our systems can operate at a high level even when order volume is surging and your processes are running at max capacity.

We also recognize how crucial flexibility is for organizations undergoing expansion, and we recommend cloud deployments for greater accessibility, reliability and security. With dedicated IT teams and redundant offsite servers, Aptean Food & Beverage ERP provides uptime of 99.9% or better and the added convenience of mobile functionality for employees working offsite.

Finally, we know that implementing a new organization-wide system can be daunting for a company trying to chart an upward trajectory, so we strive to serve as a partner in the process. From creating a roadmap and timeline complete with phases and milestones, to rolling out additional features and modules once core functionalities have been unlocked, our professional teams are with you every step of the way.

So, ready to hear more about how Aptean Food & Beverage ERP can facilitate growth for your business? Contact us today, or schedule a personalized demo to see the solution in action for yourself.