With the emergence of modern food processing technologies in a globalized business environment, the Food & Beverage industry today has taken many a dynamic turns since the past decades. The F&B industry has a global customer and supplier base owing to the increased movement and transcontinental expatriation of consumers across the world. In order to cater to such a vast global consumer, the F&B manufacturers need to adopt specific strategies in terms of choosing their suppliers, with respect to location, geographical conditions and finally their market pockets. In other words, today’s F&B industry has become global in nature in terms of their extended product categories spread over global markets which could be thousands of miles away. The F&B supply chain includes overseas imports and exports, and the products being perishable in nature the movements of goods involve critical logistic and compliance parameters.

F&B manufacturers face some unique challenges, unlike other industries, in their manufacturing, storage and shipment operations. For example, owing to the rapid change in consumer habits F&B manufacturers cannot plan on the basis of a long product life, and innovation has become a critical factor for business continuity.

Critical compliance issues such as increased levels of quality regulations, documentation and traceability; market demands for innovation; low profit margins; and shelf life management are some of the mandatory prerequisites. Moreover, issues such as quality inconsistency of procured raw materials undergoing processing leaves the final stages of production planning totally unpredictable. This further affects marketability, revenue and the overall performance of the business.

Being process manufacturing in nature, the F&B industry requires accounting for all the above factors in addition to the general industrial operations.

In order to overcome the operating challenges, F&B manufacturers needed to streamline their businesses to achieve minimal production forecast deviations, adhere strictly to regulatory compliances, maintain constant pricing bandwidths and finally service a vast and extended markets. Such real time streamlining of business and manufacturing processes in tandem was made possible by adoption of ERP practices in the F&B industry.

Companies that embraced ERP practices in this vertical saw some immediate benefits which intelligently addressed their critical issues of quality compliance, documentation and traceability of the procured raw materials by setting up dynamically controlled inventory and shipment workflows with built-in time and location alerts. Such alerts contributed to a better final production planning, which had lower deviations and errors. Moreover, such alerts also served as a major rider to manage recalls or rejects of lots with manufacturing process errors.

ATNA’s expertise consulting in F&B vertical is built on Microsoft Dynamics AX, NAV platforms which have the essential functionalities relevant to the industry. ATNA’s functional skills together with Microsoft Dynamics technology have extended benefits in the overall business performance as it enables F&B manufacturers to build a transparent Supply Chain and Inventory management system, wherein the manufacturer & the customers can trace products and collaborate together in forming procurement and shipment strategies. Furthermore, the compliance monitoring feature of the solution triggers alerts and transaction locks capturing critical data like date of manufacturing, date of packaging, expiry date with respect to lot and batch numbers.

Some of our workflow designs in this vertical have proved highly beneficial to our customers and are recognized in the industry as our own innovations. The following are a few examples of our customizations, that we fine tune and implement, based on our customers’ requirements and industry practices:

• Functionality to process metrics, reporting and publish analytics
• Forecasting revenue, sales and expenditures
• Marketing Management with the functionality to manage Product Promotions
• Inventory management & controls with Lot Traceability, Return Merchandise functionalities
• Contact Management
• BOM
• Procurement Planning and Tactical purchasing workflows
• Landed Cost Monitoring and Pricing
• Quality Management
• Business Process Re-engineering - Document Flow / Workflow Manager

ATNA’s consultants have good knowledge of the F&B domain having consulted for companies such as Unilever, Godrej Foods, Bacardi Martini, etc. The key requirement in the industry is to ensure tracking of materials while the recipe/mix is not in the system. Most of these companies have global policies to be implemented with local guidelines. ATNA’s consultants have successfully ensured meeting the organization information needs.