Food and beverage companies around the world strive to manufacture with quality and to make these products available as fast as possible to consumers on a local, national, and international scale.
That being said, moving product from the farm to factory to dinner table is no easy feat. Food and beverage manufacturers face many headwinds including margin pressures, inventory visibility, complex regulatory requirements as well as consistently evolving consumer tastes and trends.
It’s safe to say that in today’s digital age, F&B companies must rely on a technical edge to successfully deliver for hungry consumers. In this article, we dig deeper into the benefits of a cloud ERP system with particular emphasis on the positive impact for food and beverage companies.
A new recipe for food and beverage customers
Doppio partners closely with Infor to support process manufacturing companies, specifically those in the food and beverage industry vertical. In our body of work, we’ve been able to address some of these challenges head on:
- Integrating legacy systems with the latest cloud technologies to facilitate the production and distribution of perishable goods
- Supporting the full sales cycle — including salespeople and drivers — to automate and execute day-to-day tasks
- Enabling employees and senior management alike to interface with the live environment and make business decisions with uniform data
As a means to provide manufacturers with an industry-specific solution, Infor packaged the M3 application as the core part of CloudSuite Food & Beverage. This multi-tenant cloud solution caters to the food and beverage industry: enabling global supply chain connectivity, new product development, and increased operational efficiency.
Fresh new features to mitigate industry challenges
Streamlining finance and supply chain business processes
Regardless of industry, implementing or migrating to Infor CloudSuite provides an end-to-end solution with all your enterprise’s information in one place. CloudSuite F&B enables you to migrate away from traditional on-premise systems, where cross-functional information is often siloed among different systems in different departments.
Moreover, implementing an industry-specific CloudSuite gives forward thinking manufacturers a digital platform for growth — promoting collaboration and data visibility through a unified user experience. As a result, you can proactively mitigate supply and demand disruptions related to raw materials, production and logistics bottlenecks through advanced planning tools.
Easier access to data and reporting
Infor software for process industries is extremely feature rich. The product roadmap has been bolstered through the many years of customer enhancement requests, yielding a tailored solution that is delivered in a standardized tenant – no customizations required.
Capacity and planning
Other key benefits of Infor’s offering for food & beverage companies is the demand and inventory planning capabilities. Demand planning generates a highly accurate picture of future customer demand. By accurately forecasting materials projects, Infor customers are able to reduce procurement and carrying costs.
CloudSuites enable flexible operations that provide real-time visibility into various areas of business including stages of production, supply chain and shipment, as well as the impact to the general ledger resulting from operations. This visibility also mitigates the risks of manufacturing products with seasonal and highly perishable ingredients – in particular meats, cheeses and other animal byproducts.
In addition to tracking current operations at a granular level, an end-to-end cloud-based ERP helps you forecast for the future as well. By juxtaposing current operations with predicted performance, you’re able to forecast for operational differences due to seasonality, changing consumer needs, as well as managing unexpected variances to plan.
Doppio’s formula for food and beverage customers
Over the past several years, Doppio has identified and refined various solutions that help food and beverage companies connect supply chains and overcome limitations between systems.
Automated Order Fulfillment
Doppio delivers automation in the form of integrated EDI fulfillment flows to help B2B clients sell more products and fulfill faster. We have expanded this service offering to enable 3PL and 4PL connections for external warehouses and logistics networks .
Inventory Visibility & Quality
One notable feature, graphical lot tracker, provides enterprises with an intuitive UI to manage inventory levels. This is particularly helpful for growing enterprises that desire lot controlled inventory or wish to implement SQF best practices, including a recall plan. Furthermore, the quality management (QMS) capabilities natively in the ERP system provide for even greater quality control.
Continuous New Product Development
Integrated and pre-configured product lifecycle management system for food and beverage result in a shorter time to market and higher success rate of new products. Doppio delivers seamless ION BOD integrations between Product Lifecycle Management solutions, like Optiva, and M3 in the cloud to accelerate new product development and introduction while accurately tracking formula and label information. In recent years, approximately 40% of food-related recalls were due to label errors. Doppio enables the usage of Infor software to overcome the data issues that result in financial loss.
How Doppio and Infor can crisp up your customer experience
Particularly in a highly regulated industry with slim margins and ever-changing consumer preferences, a technical edge is critical for companies to succeed. Recognizing that Infor Doppio’s team of skilled functional and technical consultants can deliver on hybrid cloud software integration to keep your business fresh on all fronts. This catered approach to solution delivery provides food and beverage companies with the tools needed to manage shorter lead-times, rising transportation and logistics costs all while meeting regulatory requirements.
Client In Action
Most food and beverage manufacturers sell and deliver their products using owned or leased trucks. This can be done either via the producer’s internal fleet or external distributors and trade partners. By equipping these drivers with mobile technology, enterprises can have greater control and visibility into deliveries while improving the customer experience.
Among other client use cases, a dairy producer we’ve worked closely with relies on Infor M3 to connect with offline handheld devices used by truck drivers. This organic dairy churns out an assortment of perishable products that need to reach store shelves on time, while also accepting orders on the route. The challenge was ensuring that these offline orders entered the M3 system of record upon return to the warehouse each and every day.
The Doppio team broke down this industry-specific challenge into manageable deliverables and component parts that would ensure a high performing integration – despite the large flat files that needed to be loaded into M3. Doppio’s managed support organization ensures the stability of the codebase while supporting the transactional interfaces. The result is an integrated solution that still functions even as newer versions of M3 are released.
Wrap Up – Food for Thought
Now more than ever, cloud-based ERP is the way to go. From streamlining your supply chain to expanding demand planning and MRP, Infor CloudSuite offers a modern approach to manage business operations, refocus users from data entry to data analysis, and most importantly – delight customers.
Get in touch with Doppio Group by filling out the contact form to discuss how we can help you migrate to the cloud or make the most of your existing multi tenant deployment.
