Overview
Food and beverage companies operate in an environment very different to that of a few years ago. Producing inventory to forecast, long production runs and a limited number of product categories are no longer viable options. The changing demands of the consumer market mean that food and beverage processors cannot plan on the basis of long product lifecycles and innovation has become critical for survival.

Issues facing the food and beverage industry include increased demands for variety and innovation, government regulations concerning quality, documentation and traceability, low profit margins and the need shelf life management. Another critical issue facing the food industry is that inconsistent quality of raw materials requires dynamic recipes and variable processes. Food manufacturers must also demonstrate traceability in the end-to-end supply chain, not only for reasons of food safety and legislative compliance, but also to meet increasing expectations surrounding corporate and social responsibility.

Despite being a multi-trillion dollar industry, the worldwide food business’ annual growth is limited by expansion of the world’s population base. Competition is intense within the industry, especially in mature markets. While suppliers have increased the efficiency of their supply chains because of retailer demands and competitive pressures, branded product suppliers will continue to face growing competition from private label goods produced by retailers.

Today, the major grocery retailers face increasingly brutal price-led competition that is forcing them to reduce costs and eliminate complexity from their businesses. The drive for lower costs is encouraging global sourcing of a wide variety of foods, which adds risk to the supply chain. At the same time, the retailer is also very often the supplier’s biggest competitor. According to Standard & Poor’s, private label products now account for a large percentage of items sold in US and European supermarkets.

Industry Challenges

• Variable customer requirements
• Reduced inventory levels and inventory management challenges
• Ever-changing schedules and shorter production runs
• Short 'shelf life' of raw food materials
• Customers want more variety and innovation
• Faster cycle times and more communication
• Supply chain collaboration with other food manufacturers and distributors is critical
• Increased levels of regulation in the form of quality, documentation and traceability
• Low profit margins • Inconsistent quality of raw materials necessitating dynamic recipes and variable processes
• Forecasting in the final stages of production center around packaging size

How SYSPRO Can Help

Goods in Transit
The Goods in Transit system provides a mechanism for greater management control over stock items that are in the process of being transferred between warehouses. It achieves this by monitoring warehouses transfers and supply chain transfers. Warehouse transfers are generated using the Inventory Movements program, where the transfer of an item from a source warehouse generates a detailed record of the transaction. Stock is depleted from the source warehouse at the time of confirming each line of the transfer. At the receiving warehouse, a review process with extensive selection criteria enables you to control the receipt of this stock. Supply chain transfers are generated using the S/O Entry program. The capture of a supply chain transfer order enables you to reserve stock for transfer at a later point in time (as opposed to an immediate transfer out catered for by Inventory Movements). The primary purpose of the Goods in Transit system is to manage the regular transfer of stock between multiple warehouses.

Lot Traceability
The SYSPRO Lot Traceability module is designed to provide full traceability at transactional level for items which could cause loss of life or limb if conformance to quality standards is not adhered to. Companies in industries such as electronics, aeronautics, defense, food, pharmaceutical, motor vehicles and building would typically require the Lot Traceability module. This module records material movement through the receiving, manufacturing, assembly, inspection, stocking and final dispatch stages. The integration with SYSPRO's other modules permits full upward and downward traceability through all inventory transactions. The module traces product life cycle from raw materials to final products.

Finite Scheduling
SYSPRO has very strong, real-time finite capacity scheduling capability. In order to stay competitive, manufacturers must operate lean operations. The finite capacity capability enables manufacturers to use flexible, short-run, short-horizon scheduling resulting in cost effective jobs. Finite Capacity Scheduling creates realistic schedules and promise dates for customers, which increases profits by improving productivity and customer satisfaction, yet reducing costs. The Cell Scheduler allows each manufacturing cell to be scheduled independently with user-defined rules for optimizing and viewing work in the cell. Gantt charts show a time-based view of scheduled operations for the machines in each cell. Additional requirements for resources such as operators, setters and tools are shown in parallel with the Gantt chart when calculating the schedule. The Cell Scheduler aims to achieve the optimum utilization of resources (labor, machine and tools) and create achievable work-to lists.

Landed Cost Tracking
The Landed Cost Tracking module is designed to assist the tracking of imported goods and the establishment of an improved estimate of imported goods' overall cost. It also aids the calculation of a better actual cost at which to receive the goods, and the provision of an actual cost comparison to the various estimates made during the procurement cycle, together with the maintenance of an actual cost archive.

Quality Data Collection
The Quality module integrates the recording of quality parameters with the recording of progress data. The quality data items to be recorded are user-defined. They may be related to a machine, a product or a customer or they could be manually selected. The collected data is stored in a database, which can be queried directly or via an analysis tool. APS provides instant checks for trends and "blips" in the collected data and can be configured to provide warnings when processes reach an out-of-tolerance range.

Engineering Change Control
Engineering Change Control (ECC) enables you to improve your management of engineering changes to your products. It achieves this through various features and processes - the essence of which is the Engineering Change Order process (ECO) process. The Engineering Change Order process is a workflow type subsystem, intended to replace the paper trail that typically accompanies any changes to product design data. If a product is under the control of ECC, then any maintenance to a bill of material and/or routing of the product can be accomplished only by means of a current ECO.

Engineering Change Orders provide the following mechanisms:

• Assigning product design tasks to particular users (or groups of users)
• Transferring tasks between users (or groups of users)
• Notifying users of new tasks
• Reminding users of outstanding tasks
• Electronic sign-off

Material Variability and Dynamic Formula Adjustment
Food manufacturers have significant variance in their products from one raw material receipt to another up to the final product. SYSPRO is flexible capturing material variability, on a lot-by-lot basis, easily adjusting formulas and recipes while ensuring excellent overall quality. This flexibility will enable the manufacturer to use materials in the most effective manner enabling considerable cost savings. Many other ERP software packages essentially focus on discrete manufacturing resulting in a poor fit for the food industry due to its inflexibility in handling recipe management.

Inventory Management
The SYSPRO Inventory Management module enables food and beverage manufacturers to calculate multiple units of measure (dual units of measure) and variable or catch weights providing two separate physical measurements for an inventory lot. For example, a fish manufacturing may calculate the number of fish pieces or the price of fish per weight. This measurement flexibility will enable accurate pricing of products.

Low-Cost Manufacturing
The SYSPRO Manufacturing suite of applications enables a food manufacturing to keep finished goods in inventory at an absolute minimum. SYSPRO will enable efficiencies by maximizing throughput and resource utilization by leveling off production peaks and troughs. Improved decision making is based on what's scheduled and what's running, capacity, resources, labor, work orders, overloads, skills, potential problems, set-up, tear down and  pegging. SYSPRO will enable a manufacturer to decide where to make the product, using which resources and specify sequence scheduling thereby improving throughput.

Customer Service Management
The SYSPRO CRM suite of applications will enable food and beverage manufacturers to increase revenues and client satisfaction through optimal client management. Tightly integrated to SYSPRO's distribution and manufacturing suites, the CRM module will enable the manufacturer to decrease order cycle times and deliver product when required.