As consumers increasingly seek value in food and beverage on the one hand, and quality and convenience on the other, manufacturers need to find new avenues to differentiate their offerings, drive profitable growth and effectively manage costs. The growing need for information visibility within the industry is driving changes from raw materials and ingredients through to final packaging.
Add challenges like ever changing consumer demand and requirements, recipe complexity, capacity constraints, supply shortages, batch management and traceability, shelf-life limitations, tight margins, and the magnitude of the supply chain complexities can be tasteless.
Is it possible to manage all this complexity effectively and efficiently in SAP, without spreadsheets and manual workarounds?
Yes. SAP is designed to handle the complexities of the Food and Beverage industry and Reveal has deep industry expertise and experience applying best practices to help Food and Beverage organizations. Our education and enablement approach has brought improvements in the areas of sales order management, customer allocations, multi-sourcing, procurement automation, supply planning, demand management, OTIF, production planning and scheduling, MRP, warehouse effectiveness and more.
Consumer tastes and preferences will continuously change. Embracing this change and implementing an agile supply chain with SAP is a recipe for success already taken by a number of Reveal clients.
When Food & Beverage companies embrace the use of SAP across the operation, they can improve efficiencies, increase customer satisfaction, and gain the ability to quickly capitalize on ever changing consumer demands. Dealing with the complexities of shelf life, special handling, material availability, capacity constraints and production scheduling requires all the data to be “connected” and “trusted” in SAP.
The immediate risk to a supply chain that does not use SAP effectively and instead relies on spreadsheets and 3rd party tools, is the loss of integration and agility. When data and processes move out of SAP, cross functional integration breaks down and exposes the supply chain to inefficiencies and disruptions to the flow of data and materials. An agile supply chain is dependent on accurate and real-time information, master data aligned with business processes, team members that can critically think and make informed decisions and a single source of truth (SAP).
A supply chain operating in an optimized state means continuous improvements in service levels, inventory performance, operating costs and decision making. To help reach this state we need our team members spending more time planning and analyzing (value add activities) and less time transacting and firefighting (non-value add activities). This is especially true for Food & Beverage organizations constantly faced with consumer demand changes and supply disruptions. One of the most critical considerations in an optimization journey is how we are going to take advantage of the capabilities and best practices that exist in our core operating system, SAP.