Technology drives product innovation for food and beverages

In South Africa, food and beverage manufacturers are hard pressed to seize opportunities for product innovation. To achieve this, the elimination of IT silos between R&D, planning, procurement, manufacturing, sales, and marketing is essential. Enterprise wide visibility of data, business systems, and processes must be available to all key players.

A product lifecycle management (PLM) solution offers food and beverage manufacturers the tools needed to successfully go to market with new and improved products. Here’s how…

The Elimination of Silos

R&D departments tend to be at the center of organisational innovation and business growth. Success is almost impossible if the department is operating in a silo with only shared folders and Excel spreadsheets in use.

Infor PLM offers:

  • Organisation wide visibility from sales to marketing, procurement, production, and quality teams
  • This leads to:

– The centralisation of data and processes

– Increased visibility and automation

– A drive for innovation and improved quality control

Labelling Compliance

Integrating a PLM solution with your ERP system ensures accurate formulations, making label compliance part of the operational process. This offers the capabilities needed to design, produce, and update labels that consistently meet global regulations.

Effective Collaboration

Internal and external collaboration is vital for successful product innovation. R&D must understand how product development impacts an organisation’s entire operations. PLM helps teams:

  • Avoid buying similar and redundant raw materials already being used in existing products
  • Visibility into capacity, bottlenecks, and scheduling constraints to ensure production efficiency

Simplify Successful Product Innovation

This innovative technology helps manufacturers to streamline the development of new products, speed time-to-market, improve quality, collaboration, and product testing, and minimise production costs.

Infor PLM Capabilities

  • Demand planning

– Get an accurate picture of demand to drive production, inventory, distribution, and buying plans across operations

– Track promotional activity to monitor progress and adjust forecasted demand

  • Supply planning

– Work closely with suppliers and leverage supply chain planning tools so retailers can meet demand

  • Formula management

– Reduce time needed to develop and manage recipes, raw ingredients, and formulations

– Easily achieve regulatory and labelling compliance such as meeting reporting requirements, complying with labelling laws, and supplying ingredient details

  • Production scheduling

– Perform constraint-based scheduling to optimise production resources and the flow of product

  • Flexible quality management

– Highly flexible systems that track a wide range of attributes ensure that the sourcing and production of food products meet national and international reporting and compliance requirements

  • Unified document management

– Improves consistency and communication regarding specifications, lab results, and labelling

  • Predictive analytics

– Modern business intelligence (BI) solutions, with built-in artificial intelligence (AI), help to project trends and anticipate market demands

– This insight helps procure raw ingredients and plan use of resources

With the use of PLM solutions, food and beverage industry managers across the globe are guiding their organisations to become industry leading product innovators.

For more information about Infor PLM and its benefits for every food and beverage manufacturer, please contact Shanon Ramdaw at Shanon.Ramdaw@ioco.tech.