Your Trusted Food & Beverage ERP Solutions Experts Offer Key Insights
The Food and Beverage (F&B) sector has multiple layers of unique challenges that are quite different from many of the traditional manufacturing or distribution industries. Whether you are into food production, processing, packaging, or delivery, you need a carefully curated IT and automation strategy in order to maintain a competitive, agile and profitable business. In fact, without a proper digital transformation plan, you may find your business struggling against the backdrop of changing consumer trends, ever-evolving regulations, traceability concerns, and complex food safety management issues.
An optimally tailored Food & Beverage ERP solution, such as SAGE X3 can help you conquer many operational complexities and efficiently grow your F&B business. Read on for key insights on selecting a robust and reliable Food & Beverage industry ERP solution that boosts the performance and profitability of your business.
Top Factors to Evaluate a Suitable ERP Solution for Your Food; Beverage Business
No matter what type of food or beverage business you operate, it is important to define the top ERP solution capabilities that your business needs. Are you looking for a simple, unified tracking mechanism across functions? Are your current systems lacking rich reporting capabilities and flexible data extraction? Do you need help in proactively planning inventories, workflows, and production schedules? Are you struggling with resource optimization or regulatory compliance?
As a business owner or lead decision maker, it is all about ensuring that your chosen Food & Beverage ERP solution provides an acceptable Return on Investment (ROI). This could be in the form of:
- Improved workforce scheduling
- Better resource utilization and warehouse management
- Efficient production control and reporting
- Enhanced customer insights
- Effective regulatory compliance
Whether this is the first Food & Beverage ERP implementation for your business, or you are looking at replacing an existing system, while choosing between the various Food & Beverage ERP solutions on the market, here are some factors to consider.
• Is it solving complex optimization problems and enabling advance planning?
Achieving true optimization in the Food & Beverage business demands empowering your leaders with a modern, Business Intelligence (BI) & Analytics-led ERP solution that provides real-time, actionable information, and enables quick and efficient decision making.
•Does it maximize the efficiency of your shop floor processes?
Increasing shopfloor efficiencies involves ensuring flexible production schedules, optimum resourcing, accurate inventory management, proper production reconciliation, and cost-effective warehouse management. A holistic ERP solution will integrate and unify all the processes and sub-processes and help in eliminating existing inefficiencies. It will also have smart features and reporting capabilities that contribute towards reducing production time, cost, and wastages, improving product quality and appeal, and increasing your speed to market.
• Is it enabling smart manufacturing?
Simplified, user-friendly interfaces and the convenience of web-based access across a range of digital devices is what it takes to ensure that the key personnel can maintain proper control and oversight on your manufacturing processes. Which means, your chosen ERP solution should not only provide real-time, useful information anytime, anywhere, but also offer a range of deployment options and mobile access to enable quick decisions on the shopfloor.
• Is your ERP empowering your company to be cloud-ready without concerns of risk and availability?
Although the traditional ERP systems offer in-house data storage with better availability and control, the cost and effort of storing and securing huge amounts of data in massive on-site data centers is questionable. Modern technology maximizes the efficiencies of cloud computing by delivering simpler, faster, and flexible functionalities at the fraction of the cost of the complex traditional enterprise ERP systems. Before investing in an ERP solution, make sure that it has a proven track record for data security, promises easy data access and availability, and allows a gradual scale up of computing capacity based on your business growth and priorities.
• Are you able to accomplish enterprise-wide backward and forward traceability?
For a F&B business, lot tracking and traceability is an extremely critical feature for better handling of product quality assurance, expiration management, or recalls. Check whether your ERP solution can run traceability inquiries both, upstream and downstream. Does the system give you specific data by material or part, by batch, or for any other granular level of detail? Complete backward and forward traceability across the supply chain will not only help in establishing accountability and ownership of product quality, but also other aspects, such as change control management and pegging.
• Is your ERP adaptable to your overall business and IT strategies?
ERP systems that are not flexible or intuitive expect your business to modify core processes, instead of aligning to your business or IT strategies. A robust ERP solution is one that is adaptable and customizable to the nuances and established or proven processes of your business. While it is important not to go overboard with customizations, ensure that your chosen Food & Beverage ERP system can keep up with the evolving needs and long-term goals of your business. Whether it is complex processes and transactions, infrastructure integration and management, or deployment and subscription options, your Food & Beverage ERP solution should have the capability to support multiple scenarios and requirements.
• Does your ERP solution check all the boxes for regulatory compliance and reporting?
In the F&B sector, compliance is everything, and the margin for error is very slim. Which is why, it is extremely important that your Food & Beverage ERP solution navigates and guides you through the maze of complex and dynamic regulatory and reporting requirements. This may be across legal entities, languages, and geographies depending on the nature and presence of your business.
• Can you justify the resourcing requirements for your Food & Beverage ERP implementation?
Every organization needs to build stakeholder buy-in for the time, effort, and cost involved in a Food & Beverage ERP implementation. For this purpose, it is also important to understand the cost of inaction for implementing an ERP solution or switching to a better one. Whether you are dependent on manual processes, or stuck with outdated, legacy systems that are inadequate for your evolving business needs, establishing the financial and business viability of your ERP project will go a long way in ensuring a successful implantation and increased adoption of your new ERP solution.
What to Expect with SAGE X3?
A new-age ERP for the Food & Beverage sector, SAGE X3 can help you build a productive and cohesive organization, which successfully achieves its digital transformation goals. With powerful built-in features and intuitive capabilities, SAGE X3 has helped many organizations become more agile, efficient and profitable.
Here are some of the benefits that a SAGE X3 Food & Beverage implementation can bring to your business:
- Seamless Integration: From finance to sales, customer service, supply chain, and more, all your functions and sub-functions get access to real-time, usable, and actionable information for making intelligent and efficient business decisions.
- Multi-level Compliance: Supporting complex global processes, relationships, and transactions, SAGE X3 helps your businesses stay compliant with industry and regulatory requirements. It has the capability to support an international, multi-company, multi-currency, multi-site, and multi-language environment.
- Intuitive and Flexible Deployment: Available as on-premises and multi-cloud deployment offerings, the SAGE X3 Food & Beverage ERP solution is customizable to the unique needs and challenges of your business.
- Forward and Backward Traceability: Its strong lot tracking and traceability enables better handling of labeling, expiration management, sustainability, recalls, or other product-specific concerns, without increasing your overheads.
- Allergen Tracking: It offers sophisticated tracking of allergens in your raw materials, as well as finished products enabling your business to meet and exceed the applicable industry and regulatory standards.
- Improved Productivity: Due to its simple and powerful visual process flows and automated business workflows, your leaders can get real-time, anytime business insights, dashboards, and drill-down capabilities, along with universal access to both mobile and web devices. The better the visibility into your business, the higher your overall productivity.
- Agile and Efficient Decision Making: The system’s powerful BI and Analytics features support planning, scheduling, tracking, and reporting across all your processes and sub-processes. You and your executive leaders can respond faster to the evolving consumer demands, as well as any organization specific instabilities related to purchase, production, or shipping.
Build a Profitable, Future Ready Business with the SAGE X3 Food & Beverage ERP Solution
At Panni, we believe SAGE X3 is a well-tailored business management solution and one of the most holistic ERP platforms for F&B businesses. With solid functionalities across all core processes, and superior user interface, access and availability, SAGE X3 has the potential to maximize your ROI, and boost your digital transformation journey. With deep knowledge of the F&B industry, we can help you leverage the full benefits and power of the SAGE X3 Food & Beverage ERP solution and obtain real process and cost efficiencies.
Our enterprise consulting services have successfully deployed the SAGE X3 ERP solution for a variety of businesses in the Food & Beverage sector. In fact, our qualified professionals have built over a decade of experience in F&B ERP implementations across all business areas, including manufacturing, supply chain management, finance management, administration, support, mobile or web apps, and cloud connectivity. Business case development, technology map creation, ERP customization, or deployment and adoption, we can help your Food & Beverage business on various aspects of your end-to-end digital transformation. Our goal is to support you in achieving the right combination of technology and change management initiatives for building a profitable and future ready business.
Learn how SAGE X3 Food & Beverage ERP solutions can help your business innovate, lead, and stay ahead of the curve. Contact us to speak to one of our experts at Panni Management today.
