Lack of process visibility means exposing your company to risks: not enough inventory—or too much—quality issues, potential recalls, and more. To get the visibility you need, your team performs miracles by manually inputting data into spreadsheets, but this opens up the possibility of errors or redundancy. But this has a major effect on your productivity and your ability to deliver what your customers want.
A manufacturing cloud ERP solution connects real-time operational data collected from the plant floor (manufacturing operations) to the top floor (business management) for complete visibility into productivity (both for employees and production), traceability, and inventory management.
Visibility into Operational Productivity
With a cloud ERP on your plant floor, employees can access easy-to-use panels, logs, and screens that are right in their work areas. Intuitive touch screens give them access to everything they need to do their jobs more efficiently. Process area logs provide detailed histories of all events that occur during process set-up, including all production, maintenance, and downtime.
You can also integrate control panels, process area logs, and many other plant floor tools with production tracking, inventory, labor tracking, and hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) plans. This gives you complete visibility across all processing steps.
Users on the plant floor can better manage quality, scheduling, and intermediate inventory by tracking individual containers or individual items as they flow through their processing steps. At the same time, top floor managers directors, and executives can access the logs to pull reports on uptime, availability, and machine efficiency.
Traceability Throughout the Entire Production Process
To react to potential problems quickly and with precision, you need to trace lot information for both ingredients coming from suppliers and finished goods. You need a system that enables you to accurately track individual lots, bins, or packages as they flow through your supply chain so you can quickly react to a food safety issue or recall and ideally prove you are not culpable or minimize your exposure.
With cloud ERP you can access detailed historical information related to supply chain, production, inspection, genealogy, and usage. You can also view all ingredient lists, recipes, and formulations for each finished product. And because it’s in the cloud, you can instantly track the genealogy of any product (including one-up and one-back traceability), at any time and from anywhere with an Internet connection. Imagine being in a customer’s office and identifying the source of a specific ingredient just by logging on to your system and finding the information in a matter of minutes (versus the four hours required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Increased Inventory Accuracy
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. Not enough inventory means scrambling to fill orders, paying for rush deliveries, and potentially not delivering on your promises. In the end, you lose money and customers.
You may think it’s virtually impossible to reach 100 percent inventory accuracy but nothing is impossible with the right system in place. One process manufacturer in the food and beverage industry uses cloud ERP and makes exactly what it needs to ship on time with 99.7 percent inventory accuracy. This company’s ERP system includes traceability features and materials requirements planning (MRP) functionality, enabling the manufacturer to plan just-in-time delivery of ingredients or raw materials.
Detailed traceability, both upstream and downstream through production to shipment helps its users achieve higher profits by minimizing inventory holding costs and reducing delays caused by lack of raw materials.
Connected food and beverage manufacturers gain visibility into their entire supply chain, and even monitor operations from any mobile device. With a cloud ERP solution, there is no reason your top floor should be unaware of what is happening on your plant floor, regardless of where they are.
Learn more. Download the white paper, Must-Have ERP Features for Food Processors.