Consumers are increasingly aware of what they are putting in their bodies. The desire to lead a more natural lifestyle means that people are willing to pay a premium for organically produced food products. To satisfy this demand, not only have an abundance of small food companies sprung up, but also established businesses are adding organic lines to their range.
With a growth rate of around 15% per annum, the organic food train is a good one to jump on. However, the industry is not without its challenges. Attaining organic certification presents food manufacturers with additional hoops to jump through, organic raw materials are scarcer than standard raw materials and spoil more quickly and fluctuating costs across the entire food and beverage industry mean that manufacturers must keep a close eye on the bottom line.
The right ERP solution is key to navigating many of the obstacles that organic food manufacturers are confronted with. In this blog we look at some of the ways SAP Business One and the CompuTec solution suite can help them do that.
Real-time data, all the time
Due to short shelf-life, organic food products generally have a very short turnaround time. This means that you should be working from and making decisions based on real-time data. CompuTec ProcessForce lets you see what is happening on the manufacturing side of the business right now whether you need to know about the progress of work, production costs, inventory or any one of a multitude of other things. With the help of CompuTec PDC, production data can be entered directly into the system by the team on the shop floor via mobile devices as well.
Product Data and Recipe Management
The requirements to achieve organic status vary depending on the regulator area, but usually to declare a food product is organic, a high percentage of the raw materials must be of organic origin. As an example, in the European Union this amounts to 95% of the materials used. CompuTec ProcessForce allows you to classify and track your inventory throughout the production process so that you can calculate the organic content of your finished products with accuracy.
To help you manage recipes and production processes, CompuTec ProcessForce has a multi-level bill of materials form created with manufacturing best practices in mind. It can accommodate the simplest or the most complex, multi-level production processes while keeping things user-friendly and intuitive for the user.
CompuTec ProcessForce – Bill of Materials
Batch Traceability
Batch Traceability 360, an advanced tool for tracking all batches of goods, comes included with most CompuTec ProcessForce license/subscription types. This solution allows you to view the entire lifecycle of every batch on an interactive graph, find documents related to any batch and see information about Manufacturing Orders, Complaints, A/R Credit Notes, Customers, Deliveries, Returns, Quality Control Tests and other inventory items and final products with any kind of relationship to the batch at the click of a button. This tool makes compliance and timely reactions to issues much easier for all kinds of food manufacturers. You can see more in the short video below.
Scheduling
CompuTec ProcessForce contains a variety of tools for production planning including an interactive Gantt Chart. Here you can organize production using drag-and-drop and the knock-on effects of any changes you make will appear on the chart by default. The Gantt Chart can also provide information about the availability of materials.
CompuTec ProcessForce – Scheduling tools
CompuTec ProcessForce Scheduling – Shortages Report
Organic food standards often include rules about avoiding incidental contamination of certain materials. CompuTec ProcessForce makes it easy to plan production in such a way to avoid all kinds of cross-contamination so you can be sure that your organic products don’t come into contact with chemicals or other substances that might endanger their organic status.
Inventory Management – MRP, Shelf-life and Scrap Management
As organic raw materials often have shorter shelf-lives than their non-organic counterparts, the flow of materials through an organic food business must be very carefully orchestrated to avoid spoilage while still maintaining the sufficient stock to fulfill orders on time. Not only does CompuTec ProcessForce have tools to manage the shelf-life of inventory and scrap, but the new MRP calculation engine is ideal for managing inventory with a short turnaround time. It work’s off of live data, can take internal and external lead times and even expiry dates into consideration when making MRP recommendations.
CompuTec ProcessForce – MRP 2.5
If you have both organic and non-organic product lines, you may wish to manage this using bill of material variants, known as Revisions, so that in the system you would essentially have one product with organic and non-organic variants that each have their own set of ingredients and/or production processes. CompuTec ProcessForce MRP can also handle this so that recommendations will be made based on the exact Revision that you want to manufacture.
Quality Control
Consumers who pay that little bit extra for organic produce, expect to get their money’s worth. As well as the obvious health benefits, these consumers want to receive a better-quality product. That’s why an advanced Quality Control functionality is an absolute must. CompuTec ProcessForce provides you with a flexible solution to record all your quality control activities throughout the product lifecycle no matter how simple or how complex your procedures are.
CompuTec ProcessForce – Quality Control Test
Costing
At the time of writing this blog, inflation poses a challenge on a global scale. In the face of fluctuating raw material prices and reduced disposable incomes putting pressure on profit margins, manufacturers of all types need tools to help them track changing costs in real-time. Yesterday’s prices can be quite different from today’s. CompuTec ProcessForce’s cost calculation tools for Items, Resources, Co-products and Scrap all work from real-time data. The Costed Bill of Materials allows you to break down and analyze production costs and the Costed Manufacturing Order will make sure you know what each production job is costing you.
Another useful feature is Cost Categories. This allows you to simulate changes to production costs so if you are planning on investing in new machinery, you can see how that would affect production costs. Or perhaps you know that your raw materials or energy will cost more in the next quarter. You can simulate that scenario in the system and see how that will affect costs and subsequently your profit margins.
Warehouse Management
One of the challenges that manufacturing businesses encounter while searching for the right ERP solution is the ability to integrate the warehousing solution with the manufacturing solution. CompuTec WMS (Warehouse Management System) comes integrated with both SAP Business One and CompuTec ProcessForce out-of-the-box so there is no need to expend your resources on a time-consuming and costly integration. Warehouse operatives enter data into the system and track warehouse movements via mobile devices, barcode scanners and industrial weight scales and you can use that data to optimize warehouse workflow, ensure proper stock rotation and keep warehousing costs low.
To find out more about CompuTec ProcessForce and the rest of the CompuTec solution suite for SAP Business One please use our website live chat or drop us an email at info@computec.pl
