3 Trending Technologies and the Benefits They Offer Food and Beverage Businesses

Technology continues to drive innovation and improvement in the food and beverage industry, unlocking key benefits and advantages in this dynamic market. This is exciting news for businesses like yours, as the demands of today’s consumers and regulatory agencies are increasing over time, setting the bar ever higher for the standards companies must meet.

One of the main challenges that food and beverage organizations are facing is the pressure to provide healthy products—according to research by ING, 43% of consumers around the world place a higher priority on this matter than in the past. There’s also the push to become more sustainable, with research firm Kerry finding that 75% of consumers expect brands to invest in sustainability.

Further still, the rising level of competition in the food and beverage marketplace is yet another obstacle to overcome, as profit margins have historically been thin and new start-ups have the potential to disrupt the space and squeeze out traditional providers. This all puts an impetus on your business to seek out every advantage you can get—which brings us back to how technology can give you the edge you need.

In this post, we’ll cover three technologies and how they improve outcomes on multiple fronts in the food and beverage industry. We’ll also discuss how these technologies fit into a holistic digital transformation.

1. Business Intelligence Provides Actionable Insights

Defined as technology-driven processes for analyzing data and delivering actionable information, business intelligence (BI) has the potential to give your company’s key stakeholders the additional insight they need to make optimal decisions. That’s because software that incorporates this technology can track a wide variety of metrics and identify the relationships between them effectively and efficiently.

This can have considerable implications for a variety of considerations that food and beverage businesses must account for, including product safety, quality assurance and profitability. For example, business intelligence can allow a business to observe the direct impact that a change in inspection procedures has on the number of finished goods flagged for health concerns, fueling a cycle of continuous improvement.

Aptean Business Intelligence utilizes machine learning to help food and beverage businesses track more than 300 key performance indicators (KPIs), helping you get the results you’re looking for—faster and more reliably. The KPI trees that our solution utilizes to visually convey the interrelated nature of various factors at work in food and beverage operations can give your staff a more holistic view of the organization and how to realize the results you’re looking for.

2. Access to Real-Time Information Enables Greater Sustainability

In food and beverage factory settings, achieving greater sustainability can be achieved in various ways, but two are especially relevant—minimizing spoilage of perishable ingredients and reducing waste from faulty manufacturing processes. While accomplishing these critical tasks manually can be challenging, syncing all of your information in real-time across your company with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution helps you master them, no matter how busy your shop floor gets.

By using mobile barcode scanners and capturing important expiration date and freshness range information of your raw materials as they’re received, an ERP solution can help you keep track of these vital details and employ a first-expiry, first-out (FEFO) picking order. That helps you ensure that you get the most out of your investment while also doing right by the planet and preserving resources.

Likewise, real-time performance reporting thanks to integrations with your electronic manufacturing equipment can provide your employees with up-to-the-minute results, allowing them to identify issues that are leading to imperfect products that will need to be scrapped. That lets them intervene and rectify the underlying problems to ensure that you’re not eating away at your business’s efforts to become more environmentally friendly.

3. Cloud-Enabled ERP Solutions Unlock Enhanced Flexibility

Multi-tenant and single-tenant cloud solutions are no doubt some of the most popular software environments today, and the infrastructure to support them has improved rapidly in just a few years to provide the stability that modern businesses need. This is especially important in the food and beverage industry, considering companies like yours have ambitious targets and production stoppages are to be avoided at all costs.

An industry-specific, cloud-based ERP system can give you the flexibility and dependability that you need to keep up in such a dynamic marketplace. That’s thanks to a lightweight deployment, broader accessibility options and off-site servers maintained by the solution provider’s dedicated IT teams.

What’s more, cloud implementations tend to be less expensive, as they don’t require the up-front costs of additional hardware. We have our clients deploy Aptean Food & Beverage ERP in the cloud using a multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) model, as such a setup allows for full scalability of operations and greater flexibility, as all updates can be applied remotely.

Aptean: Always Forging Forward

Here at Aptean, we have a future-focused mindset and always keep an eye toward the horizon so that we can keep you Ready for What’s Next, Now®. You’ll find that philosophy abundantly clear if you explore our full suite of food and beverage software, which we’ve created to function as a cohesive ecosystem and help businesses tackle the challenges of today’s food and beverage world.

We like to think that a purpose-built food ERP like ours is the ideal foundation of a sound digital transformation. Aptean Food & Beverage ERP was designed using our collective decades of experience in the sector and superior technological know-how, and selecting us as your provider not only ensures you get the best system on the market, but also a partner and guide during the implementation process.

We chose to build our unique, industry-specific IP on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central platform, which keeps it approachable and user-friendly despite how advanced and powerful the underlying system is. We were also honored by Frost and Sullivan with their prestigious 2022 Product Leadership Award in North American ERP Software for the Food and Beverage Industry.

Now, if you’re ready to learn more about how Aptean Food & Beverage ERP can help your business leverage these technologies and more, contact us today. You can also request a personalized demo for an up-close look.