Essential Features in Foodservice ERP

The food and beverage industry has entered into an era where your customers demand greater visibility and accountability from their suppliers than ever before. Specialized foodservice ERP tools help foodservice manufacturers provide detailed product information to their customers, giving them the ability to track where and how food products are processed at every step before they hit the shelves or table. Here are just a few consumer and vendor concerns that your foodservice ERP helps you to track through the product lifecycle:

• Allergens: Does your product contain a common allergen? Is it possible that it came into contact with an allergen during production? Allergen visibility matters to many vendors and consumers, most frequently with gluten, dairy, seafood, and nut allergies.

• Dietary restrictions: Many consumers follow strict dietary plans, so it’s important that you track and clearly label all ingredients in your products even before they make it to the grocery store. Grocers and other food distributors often divide their products so that consumers who are immunocompromised, voluntarily following a vegan or vegetarian diet, or upholding religious or personal beliefs can easily find and identify products that work for them. Production visibility gives your customers detailed ingredient and preparation knowledge, so you can provide them with the information to appropriately label, advertise, and sell their products to consumers who observe strict dietary guidelines.

• Environmental concerns: Are all of the ingredients in your product USDA organic certified or following some other sustainability guidelines? Is your production facility or packaging following green best practices? Production visibility lets you know how your products affect the environment from farm to table, which gives you the data to share with distributors who directly sell your products to consumers.

This level of visibility in specialized foodservice ERP platforms is called end-to-end traceability and is one of the most important features of a foodservice ERP tool. Regardless of where your product falls in the manufacturing process, end-to-end traceability features give you the data to catch deviations from established food quality processes. Part of why end-to-end traceability works is because every phase of the production process is integrated into your ERP platform, meaning that all of your visibility statistics are pulled from the same master data set.

End-to-end traceability helps your internal teams understand how to optimize production, but more importantly, it holds your team accountable through data sources that accurately verify production quality for your customers.

Vendor Communication and Customer Relationship Management

Foodservice ERP platforms need to track and manage compliance and safety measures in order to protect the end user’s health. This means that quality controls need to be established, monitored, and reported at every stage of the manufacturing and supply chain process, giving you the real-time visibility to monitor, assess, and adjust your distributed products based on predetermined shelf life and recipe control metrics.

Production visibility is key to quality control in the ERP. Unfortunately, it seems that detailed visibility is one of the biggest weaknesses across the food industry.

This is what Winzeler had to say about the top struggles he sees his foodservice clients facing:

“The biggest pain point can be described as ‘lack of visibility’. A lot of companies in the FB space still operate in different disconnected environments and getting a full picture of where they stand is a huge challenge.”

With all of your systems united under one ERP platform, you can achieve higher visibility and quality control levels in production, labor, order fulfillment, and many other steps in your supply chain management protocols.

Product Recalls and Audits

Quality control features are crucial when you’re faced with a product recall or a supply chain audit. Disparate systems and processes make it difficult to track down and communicate any issues in your production pipeline. When you have a wholly integrated foodservice ERP platform, you’ll see where every product and/or contamination comes into your supply chain and can adjust processes and remove affected products from distribution accordingly.

You can only guarantee the quality of your products if you fully control their distribution through process manufacturing and other sophisticated ERP features. Process manufacturing sometimes involves chemical transformations of your ingredients and materials, but it can also involve physical adjustments to modes of production that improve your processes. The best foodservice ERP platforms incorporate a few key features to optimize materials and subsequent experiences for both your employees and your vendor customers:

Process manufacturing at the storefront level

When you are a foodservice manufacturer, tracking product quality becomes even more complex once it reaches a vendor’s storefront. Your foodservice ERP tool needs strong process manufacturing features like distribution scheduling, quality analysis, and production control to ensure the quality of your products at all consumer fronts. Process manufacturing features protect both you and the vendor from product and supply inconsistencies.

E-commerce and user data

Do you directly sell your products to businesses and/or consumers? Your foodservice ERP platform should incorporate strong e-commerce features, such as user-friendly website portals and real-time data analytics delivery, either natively or through interoperable applications. A solid e-commerce platform makes the user experience run smoothly while providing you with the purchasing data you need to forecast future production needs.

Choosing Your ERP Solution

Are you a food and beverage manufacturer with production needs that aren’t met by a baseline ERP system? There are multiple foodservice software options on the market, with custom ERP tools and specialized consulting firms like RSM US, so it’s difficult to choose the best fit for your business.