As 2022 reaches the halfway mark, food manufacturers and processors are still facing pandemic-induced challenges, including labor shortages and supply chain disruptions. On their own, these challenges are difficult—and expensive—to manage but add internal production and inventory management inefficiencies to the mix, and they become almost impossible to overcome.
So, what can manufacturers and processors do? Implement food manufacturing software.
In a new eBook, How to Save Money in Food Production and Inventory Management, NexTec Group delves into five food manufacturing and processing inefficiencies. It examines the cost of mishandling these inefficiencies and how FoodBusiness ERP—comprehensive food business software built in Sage X3 and delivered by NexTec industry experts—can help manufacturers and processors manage them.
Managing Inefficiencies with Food Business Software
The eBook’s first inefficiency is downtime—the dreaded halting of production due to lack of staffing, issues in food quality or equipment failure. The cost of shutting down is exorbitant, often adding up to thousands of dollars per hour. Suffice to say, a reduction in downtime should be a priority, and the eBook provides a solution:
FoodBusiness ERP can help you resolve downtime with its aptly named Downtime Incident Management feature. This feature provides you with visibility into your operations, allowing you to track and analyze downtime incidents. You can see when, where and why the downtime transpired. You will be able to spot trends, make changes and prevent the downtime from happening again.
Preventing downtime is an amazing money-saving benefit of food manufacturing production software, as is automating warehouse processes. Unfortunately, many manufactures and processors continue to rely on manual data entry, opening the door to multiple, pricey errors. By utilizing a scanner and barcoding provided by FoodBusiness ERP’s integrated Scan and Pack feature, manufacturers and processors can correct this inefficiency, saving time, increasing the line’s speed and improving accuracy.
The Scan and Pack feature also plays a significant role in inventory management. Often an inefficient process, managing inventory successfully (e.g., not having too much or too little stock on hand) requires substituting industry-specific software for error-prone spreadsheets. When food manufacturers and processors wisely finance such an upgrade, they’re able to track their inventory’s full lifecycle automatically and accurately.
They’re also be able to:
- Accommodate different storage conditions
- Manage shelf-life/expiration dates
- Control quality consistency
Further automated inventory management benefits are revealed in the eBook along with the final two inefficiencies: lack of product optimization and inadequate waste/ingredient management.
Saving Money with FoodBusiness ERP
FoodBusiness ERP is designed to correct inefficiencies stemming from the use of disconnected and aging systems. It’s a modern solution that helps food manufacturers and processors manage their food manufacturing production and food manufacturing inventory management needs effectively, saving them time, effort and money.
NexTec’s customer, ARA Food Corp, is a perfect example.
The company manufacturers snacks made from plantains. After implementing FoodBusiness ERP, ARA Food Corp is able to capture manufacturing data in real time; optimize its scheduling and resource allocation with reports and detailed cost tracking; and ensure compliance and consistency with improved traceability, quality control and recall management.
Says Marta De Varona, VP Finance and Administration, “We’re out in front of operations now. We can spend time analyzing and improving plant functioning, not simply collecting and entering data.”
She also notes: “Our lead time from order to shipment is just a few days. We claim that we have the least number of days from production to store delivery in the market. The capabilities of FoodBusiness ERP help us achieve that speed and level of agility.”
To learn more about how FoodBusiness ERP can help your business achieve these same results and save money in the process, download the eBook and contact our experts today. We’d love to chat.