How To Digitize Your End-To-End Food & Beverage Supply Chain Custom content for Advantive by studioID

Supply chain constraints, changing consumer preferences, traceability requirements, new government regulations, and the national labor shortage have had significant impacts on the food and beverage supply chain. To address roadblocks, smart companies are investing in technology that helps them do more with less, address current disruptions, and plan for the future. Unfortunately, many businesses still rely heavily on manual systems, spreadsheets, and disconnected software solutions to run their end-to-end food and beverage supply chains. This not only hinders the flow of materials and creates...

Once digitized, the food and beverage supply chain also becomes more efficient, greener, and customer service-focused. When supply chain partners can collaborate effectively on cloud-based software platforms, it positively impacts the quality and consistency of products as they move throughout the supply chain. “Manufacturing is a highly-collaborative effort. Even with strong partnerships across suppliers, there will still be variabilities in the manufacturing process itself,” said Brad Armstrong, vice president of sales at Advantive, a software company that provides enterprise solutions for...

High Marks for Consistency, Quality, and Reliability Regardless of where they are in the world, consumers expect Coca-Cola to taste like Coca-Cola the minute they open the bottle or pop the lid on that can. This expectation of quality, taste, and consistency radiates across the entire food and beverage supply chain, where both internal and external suppliers are expected to deliver on customer expectations every single time. Achieving that goal has grown much more difficult for companies that rely heavily on manual processes to run their supply chains, collaborate with partners, and maintain...

You Can’t Run a Modern Supply Chain with Paper and Pencil As they evaluate today’s typical food and beverage supply chain, Weisbrod and Armstrong are shocked to see how many organizations are still using pencil and paper to orchestrate those critical networks. Some use print-out forms while others have multiple spreadsheets housed on individual computers. These approaches inhibit access to necessary, reliable data that all team members require to make fast, educated decisions. To create the COAs, the lab has to be able to collect data at certain intervals throughout the production process. “A...

The New Era of Food Safety In 2020, the FDA laid out new guidelines for food safety and traceability. The New Era of Smarter Food Safety blueprint outlines achievable goals to enhance traceability, improve predictive analytics, respond more rapidly to outbreaks, address new business models, reduce contamination of food, and foster the development of stronger food safety cultures. The blueprint centers around four core pillars that include both tech-enabled traceability and the use of “smarter tools and approaches” for prevention and outbreak response. To best meet these requirements, food and...

The FDA’s newest initiative is very much about traceability and the idea that the individual consumer in a grocery store can buy a piece of produce and see the entire chain of custody — from when that product was picked, harvested, shipped, etc. — all the way to making it into their hand. Eric Weisbrod Senior Vice President of Product Management at Advantive When using technology to digitize end-to-end supply chains, manufacturers can not only meet these federal mandates, but they also improve traceability, gain higher levels of real-time visibility, operate more efficiently, and improve customer...

Supply Chain Digitization in Action Across the food and beverage sector, there are examples of companies that are using digitization to improve supply chain performance and product quality. For example, Advantive recently worked with a large confectionary goods manufacturer that relies on multiple contract manufacturers (CMs) to produce some of its ingredients and products. For food and beverage manufacturers, CMs may provide access to specialized equipment and expertise, product capacity and production mix flexibility, and/or reduced costs through economies of scale. These companies play an...

In the case of the confectionary goods maker, the company also gained better visibility into the quality of products being produced on its contract manufacturers’ shop floors. For example, when the manufacturer installs a piece of equipment at the CM’s site, it uses the software to keep close tabs on the quality data and makes quick adjustments as needed. T his gave the manufacturer more visibility into their suppliers’ real-time data. The company also now has the continuous reporting capabilities and dashboards that it needs to be able to monitor key, agreed-upon metrics that the supply chain...

Taking a Holistic Approach to Digitization Advantive’s portfolio of products accommodates specific requirements within the food and beverage manufacturing space and helps companies digitize their end-to-end supply chains. By providing a centralized system that all supply chain partners can access and use, the software enables good decision-making that, in turn, leads to improved product quality and customer satisfaction. When they replace their previously-manual systems with a centralized software system, food and beverage manufacturers also get the opportunity to make other improvements that...

It’s about understanding their requirements and their end goals right from the outset, knowing that it will shape a lot of decisions involved with the digitization process. Eric Weisbrod Senior Vice President of Product Management at Advantive For example, the food and beverage production environment usually requires a lot of hosing down and washing to ensure cleanliness and sterility. It also involves many different devices and electronic equipment that can be damaged by water. However, if those devices are only a couple of hundred dollars each and store their data in the cloud (rather than...