The food and beverage industry is one of the largest industries in the world catering to the thirst and hunger needs of consumers. However, the wants of these consumers in terms of choices are ever evolving causing an increase in demand for high quality fresh, chilled and frozen products. This has given rise to the challenging need of continuous innovation by the food and beverage manufacturers. Moreover, there are increasing challenges in terms of food safety regulations, ingredient traceability, shelf-life tracking, recipe management, seasonal demand forecasting, clean labelling etc along with the inevitable need of keeping the cost low.

Therefore, in order to overcome the above challenges, it is crucial for food and beverage manufacturers to implement an ERP system specifically designed for their industry. By implementing a food and beverage ERP software such as Eazy ERP, organizations can facilitate teams with a common platform for performing different assignments like locating a recipe, monitoring cost of production, tracking ingredients, loss of inventory, ingredients, etc. Eazy ERP additionally ensures Food safety by tracking product details, expiry dates, food content etc.

Functionalities of ERP for Food & Beverage Industry:

1. Shelf Life Management: Companies can establish shelf life parameters for individual product category. For instance, certain products may have a predetermined shelf life of 90 days from the date of manufacture while others may have a shelf life of 120 days. Products with a long shelf-life integrate easily into long-term planning and business cycles, but products with short shelf-life span require a highly recurring business plan. Food ERP system should consider the length of each item’s life cycle for planning reorder levels accordingly and reduce your chances of losing money due to an inventory item outliving its shelf-life.

2. Serial Number Tracking: It is vital for any food ERP to keep a track on items in terms of production, raw material information for each finished product, dispatch details, sales return, etc. Serial number tracking helps organizations track their products at various stages of batch production and facilitates reverse tracking in case of defects and returns. Eazy ERP has the ability to track and record products at all stages of production such as location of the batches of finished product with serial number information, its dispatch details, purchase returns, sales returns etc.

3. Supply Order Tracking: A food ERP needs to have supply or customer order tracking ability from sales order generation to production & procurement planning and dispatch. Moreover details of stock at dealer level can be monitored in ERP.

4. Food Expiry Management: According to a research, dairy, eggs and fresh meat are the top three products consumers check the expiry for followed by bread, cheese and beverages. For companies in the food industry, safety is the crucial key to success as it is important to provide customers with safe and fresh products. The FEFO (first-expired first out) method helps to ensure that the products are being used well before its expiry date and that no expired product, or product that includes expired ingredients, is being sold to customers. Moreover, reducing inventory shrink by keeping spoilage to a minimum is crucial for any food manufacturing or processing company as it can mean big losses for the company.

5. Exhaustive Barcoding: Tracking and recording product information manually can be a time consuming task. This information can be directly captured by the product and shared to a computer system with the help of barcodes. Scanning items in transit accelerates delivery times and reduce idle time. Eazy ERP allows you to perform quick & accurate checks across multiple departments and product lines with its barcoding functionality. These barcodes can be customized to facilitate detailed information such as raw material used, expiry dates, product size, structure, packaging type etc.

6. Multi-Stage Quality Control: Quality Control are systems that work to eliminate inconsistencies & defects in manufactured products as well prevent products with defects from being released in the market for consumption. Quality control capabilities are required throughout the production processes right from material inward to dispatch in order to ensure compliance with regulatory guidelines and following standards. Eazy ERP records every quality testing activity that takes place in your company and uses this information to prevent bad product from entering or leaving your facilities or ensure that an item meets certain specifications before it is used.

7. Reduced material waste: Eazy ERP lets you define provision for wastage based on historic data which can be set in Bill of Materials preventing excess wastage in the future. It also helps in determining the root causes of wastage in order to rectify the issue.

8. Recipe Management: This is one of the major concerns of food and beverage manufacturers due to an inherent need of having tight control over recipes or formulas. This is done to maintain consistency in the product output by ensuring that the recipes are not altered during the course of operations. with or changed inadvertently to ensure product consistency, quality, and traceability. Eazy ERP ensures that all areas of the manufacturing enterprise are sharing the same data and interpreting information and analysis accurately. It also facilitates easy storage & accessibility of recipes.

Eazy ERP is a comprehensive solution for F & B manufacturing business that streamlines the entire production process and helps them ensure food safety for staying compliant with regulatory bodies. It also facilitates product consistency through recipe management which is a major issue in food manufacturing facilities among other operation related issues such as shelf life management, expiration, supply order tracking, sales inward, purchase returns etc.