Could a modern ERP help your food and beverage business become more competitive? Here’s what to know.

Most food and beverage producers still operate on legacy software systems. These systems may have served your business well in the past, but today, they make it harder to track materials, manage inventory and control costs.

To solve these and other challenges, more food and beverage companies are turning to modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. An ERP can help your business operate more efficiently and effectively by giving you new capabilities that legacy systems are simply not able to offer.

Keep reading to learn more.

What is an ERP?

An ERP is a software platform that serves as a financial and operational hub for your food and beverage business. It allows you to understand what is happening inside your business and your supply chain so you can make smarter, more proactive decisions.

• Core ERP functions include accounting, finance, production and warehousing.
• An ERP also integrates with additional peripheral systems you may already be using, like an MES, EDI or compliance reporting.
• By linking with peripheral systems, an ERP helps make all of your operations more visible and effective.

In the past, many ERP companies didn’t offer support for batch manufacturing. But that’s changed, with a wide range of ERP solutions now available that can help food and beverage producers leapfrog decades worth of tech-based or operational problems.

How does implementing an ERP benefit food and beverage businesses?

An ERP is a foundational software tool that helps a business operate more efficiently and effectively. But for food and beverage producers, specifically, it can also offer a competitive edge, because so many of your peers are still operating on older systems.

Here are key benefits you could see from an ERP transformation:

1. Operational visibility

A modern, cloud-based ERP gives you clear visibility into what’s happening inside your business. This includes not just your financials but also your production process, as your ERP can share data with your manufacturing execution system (MES) to give you a big-picture perspective on your production lines.

As a result, your decision makers gain more real-time clarity into key questions like which of your products are most profitable, and that can help your business adapt to meet today’s challenges.

2. Work more efficiently

An ERP can dramatically speed up many of your older manual or spreadsheet-based processes. For example, your team may currently be manually collecting data from peripheral systems and putting it into spreadsheets for analysis and reporting purposes. An ERP can automate that entire process, freeing up your team to focus on higher-level work.

3. Better cost controls

Older systems typically only offer insight into standard and average costs. A new ERP also allows you to account for additional costs like supply chain disruptions, one-time expenses and climate or weather-related issues. You’ll also be able to more rigorously look for ways to cut down on waste in the production process.

4. Easier training

Legacy systems make onboarding new team members harder because those systems have often been patchworked together over decades. Training new employees on a modern ERP allows for faster, more standardized onboarding. It also insulates your business against risks like losing the one employee who understands how your legacy accounting system actually works.

5. Integrated systems

A new ERP makes all of your systems more effective because it helps serve as a hub for your peripheral systems. This allows you to bring together data much more quickly, rather than having to painstakingly pull it from each individual peripheral system, and it also makes you better able to take advantage of AI, which needs all that data to operate effectively.

6. Competitive advantage

Most food and beverage producers are still running on legacy systems. If you migrate to an ERP while your competitors are still operating on decades-old software and spreadsheets, you will be digging with a backhoe while your peers are relying on shovels.

7. Happier team

New systems allow your team members to avoid monotonous, time-consuming tasks. They also help you streamline your workflows, making for a better work experience for your team as a whole.

8. Experimentation

Better tracking capabilities make it easier to experiment with new product ideas. You’ll be able to more quickly assess the performance of various product tests to decide if an experiment is paying off.

9. Avoid product shortages

New ERPs dramatically improve your materials tracking and inventory management capabilities. This helps you avoid production slowdowns and keep shelves full of your products.

10. Simplified recall and compliance

Many food and beverage companies are still handling recalls and other key compliance tasks out of spreadsheets. A modern ERP allows you to largely automate this process, quickly notifying stakeholders, tracking affected batches and more.

How do you successfully migrate to a new ERP for your food and beverage business?

Food and beverage CFOs and operational leaders considering an ERP migration should focus on how an ERP can help solve specific business problems. Here are key steps to a successful upgrade process:

1. Know thyself

Start from a place of curiosity. You may have been running on the same systems for a decade or more. So, what new options are out there? Learn more about what modern ERPs can deliver.

Then think about specific processes within your business that a new ERP could help improve. Take the time to dive in and understand how your business works right now so you can assess whether an ERP would allow you to operate more effectively.

What specific business problems could an ERP help you solve?

2. Consult an advisor

Once you have specific ideas about how you could use an ERP to improve your existing processes, pull in an advisory firm. Talk with your advisor about what you want to change within your business. Your advisor can help you weigh different ERP options to make sure your systems align with your needs.

Look for an advisory firm that understands both enterprise tech and the food and beverage business.

3. Consider food-specific factors in potential ERPs

Food and beverage businesses need specific features from an ERP. Be sure any options you are considering include capabilities like compliance, traceability, shelf life and ingredient blending, not just a generic pledge that they work for food companies.

4. Think about nonfood-specific factors as well

Also consider nonfood-specific elements when choosing an ERP. Factors like purchasing, accounting, tracking profitability and managing vendor or supplier relationships all matter. A good ERP will fit your business holistically.

5. Factor in whether an ERP can be tailored

Even the best ERP options probably won’t offer everything you need off the shelf, so learn more about whether your potential ERP options can be tailored, if needed. This can allow you to account for elements like protecting recipes or other trade secrets that you don’t want exposed on public cloud servers or shared with AI.

How Wipfli can help

We advise food and beverage producers on how to strengthen performance, including by migrating to a modern, cloud-based ERP platform. Let’s talk about the specific challenges you face and how we can help you solve them. Start a conversation.

Could a new ERP give your business a competitive edge?

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