Seven ‘must have’ ERP features for food manufacturers

Food manufacturers are facing tougher challenges than ever before. In order to meet record-keeping and lot-tracking requirements, they must be able to rapidly identify and track every single ingredient in their products, from receipt through processing, packaging and shipping to the exact customer location.

Food manufacturers are turning more and more frequently to software solutions that help them achieve this level of traceability and better manage their overall operations. Today’s leading ERP solutions go beyond the historical ERP strengths of finance and accounting to give organisations the ability to achieve complete process visibility - enabling them to meet their stringent requirements and avoid product recalls or delays.

Food manufacturers aiming to achieve optimal performance must have systems that also have non-conformance/corrective, preventative action and statistical process control capabilities.

Support for these features will ensure that the company achieves the highest levels of quality, productivity and profitability.

1. Full track and trace, beyond one-up/one-back

According to government regulations, food processors must be able to trace every ingredient in their individual products in order to isolate problems quickly and with pinpoint precision. They must have a system that enables them to accurately track individual bins, containers and packages as they flow through the manufacturing process and distribution chain. To achieve best-in-class performance, they even need to track products as far back as the farms that produced their original raw ingredients.

Integrated ERP software can meet this need, providing detailed historical information related to supply chain, production, inspection, genealogy and usage - tracing everything about a product

2. Quality and supply chain management

The ability to manage production quality is critical to food processors. Their ERP systems must provide the capability to track real-time data on all aspects of manufacturing and supply during production and store the data in archives for audits or future reference.

The quality-management functionalities should enable food manufacturers to track quality using tools like conformance/corrective and preventative action and statistical process control and other best practices. The entire system should be integrated, so quality functions can link with supply chain management functions to give manufacturers a complete view of their quality performance one step back and one step forward in the supply chain - from their suppliers’ operations through the ‘next-step’ customers and to the end consumers.

3. Batch recipe management

To meet their health and safety requirements, food manufacturers’ ERP software must have the ability to track all data related to their batch recipes - descriptive information, technical properties and quantities in user-definable units, costing information, notes and history. Best practices include clear alerts and notifications regarding possible allergens, with the data stored for years - or even decades.

The amount of data can be extensive, particularly for operations that produce dozens or hundreds of recipe combinations. That’s why it is critical that food processors rely upon a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that accurately identifies and tracks information for every ingredient in every batch produced by its user companies - and which keeps all data online and accessible at all times.

4. Electronic document management

Like all manufacturing companies today, food processors strive to achieve the greatest possible productivity. They must have a software system that provides electronic document management in support of a paperless environment. Not only does this save employees time, it speeds up overall operations and reduces room for human error.

The system should enable food manufacturers to produce and attach electronic files in any format - JPEG, Word, Excel, PDF, or any other format requested by the customer - to sales orders, item masters, purchase orders or accounting transaction files. Additionally, all revisions of these documents are controlled in a document management system, for a complete product history record.

5. Inventory optimisation

In food manufacturing, excess inventory is more than just wasted cost. When perishable raw materials are involved, surplus inventory and delays in processing can also lead to quality and safety issues. This is why inventory optimisation is a ‘must have’ ERP feature for food manufacturers.

The ERP system must include traceability features with serialised container and individual tracking. It must also include materials requirements planning (MRP) functionality, enabling the manufacturer to plan ‘just-in-time’ delivery of raw materials.

6. Integrated financials

Food manufacturers must have the ability to quickly and easily access consolidated financial information. They need an ERP system that enables them to trace costs associated with individual products and product lines right down to the ingredients, or raw materials, used in every one of their products.

A major advantage can be achieved through the integration of production and accounting modules. Rather than a traditional scenario of separate software packages, integrated modules that cover virtually every function and department within the manufacturing enterprise allow data to flow seamlessly between departments that used to be stand-alone silos of information. There’s no need to build ‘patches’ between systems or reconcile different reports that were generated from different systems.

Every department can access the same, real-time information.

7. Customisable bar coding

Food processors must have an ERP system with built-in bar code functionality, including label printing and scanning, and the system must allow for customisation to meet unique requirements. Bar coding enables system users to perform accurate and speedy quality checks across their entire product lines, as well as tracking detailed cost information at every step of the process. Flexible options allow users to scan bar codes on work orders, read all of the items required at each stage of each recipe, then scan the pre-measured and bar-coded raw materials for that step to ensure that the product contains all the right ingredients added in the right sequence.

The bar-coding functionality can be customised to add any codes or symbols needed by individual customers. For example, it can add allergen symbols on the bar codes of potentially life-threatening products and raw materials.