Whether you’re a manufacturer, distributor or wholesaler, business process automation can have a transformative effect on your organisation if you are operating within the food and beverage supply chain.
From more effective quality control processes to boosted efficiency and improved stock visibility, automation can be applied to a wide range of functions to streamline, simplify, and provide organisations with far greater control over their day-to-day operations.
And in the journey towards digital transformation, applying process automation to the workflows involved in master data management can enable food and beverage companies to effortlessly manage their product data in ways that save time, reduce costs, improve accuracy and compliance, and maximise sales opportunities.
5 Ways Automation Can Improve Your Food and Beverage Company:
- Improved quality control
Maintaining the highest standards of quality across the supply chain is one of the main challenges for organisations operating within the food and beverage sector. Tracking processes, workers and interactions efficiently and effectively can be complex, with many companies struggling with a lack of visibility across the entire system.
Quality management system standards such as ISO 9001 use a risk-based approach to help improve business processes, increase product quality, and exceed customer expectations.
By automating business workflows, food and beverage organisations can replace error-prone manual tasks with streamlined automated processes which simultaneously improve efficiency and provide an easy way to track, monitor and manage information quality.
Automation can have a particularly powerful effect when applied to master data management processes—such as data collection, validation and approvals—allowing food and beverage companies to improve consistency, accuracy and compliance while minimising the time and resources involved in these processes.
- Better product traceability
End-to-end traceability of all products is a critical component for food and beverage brands—with potentially devastating consequences facing those who fail to identify product issues before they hit the shelves.
By using automation tools to simplify and streamline the processes involved in tracking goods throughout the supply chain, you’ll be empowered with the visibility you need to quickly recognise and address problems before they impact partners, consumers, or your brand.
Automated product data management workflows make this process faster, easier and far more efficient—and when these powerful workflows are connected with an advanced master data management solution, they enable authorised team members with access accurate, complete product data that forms a single source of truth.
Taking this one step further, you can leverage automated master data management processes to gain valuable insights into your products, customers, and market, allowing you to develop new products and cater to changing demands more readily.
- Increased efficiency and output
Of course, one of the main advantages of automation is its ability to improve efficiencies and increase productivity. By replacing time-consuming and cumbersome manual tasks with fast and streamlined automated processes, digital technology can save you significant amounts of time while reducing costs and minimising the human error that’s inherent in manual actions.
The 24/7 performance of computers means you can leverage automation in your business to dramatically improve output without having to worry about dips in performance or quality. As a result, your team will be freed up to focus on higher-value tasks.
What’s more, a customisable business process automation solution will ensure your automated processes fit the unique and ever-changing requirements of your business; look for software that can be tailored to your needs with intuitive tools and custom workflows.
- Reduced product recall rates
Minimising the instances of products being recalled is an essential part of protecting your brand, as well as reducing the risk to customers.
With today’s consumers demanding an increasingly detailed level of information about the products they purchase, food and beverage companies need to find ways to streamline the process of ensuring their product data is accurate, complete and up-to-date.
Process automation can provide significant benefits in maintaining the accuracy and compliance of product information.
For example, by automating the collection and validation of GS1 standardised product data required by the retailers via the National Product Catalogue (NPC), food and beverage companies can quickly and easily ensure the completeness of , reducing the risk of mislabeled products or missing information caused by manual data entry.
What’s more, by using electronic V6 product information forms (PIFs), food and beverage organisations can easily provide information on products and ingredients in a single document that meets all legal and regulatory compliance needs, as well as including any related information such as certificates, product documentation and images. An automated solution such as Bizcaps’ PIF Manager allows you to manage all your PIFs from a single, central web-based repository.
When product recalls do occur—as they inevitably will from time to time—automation can help to minimise the impact on your brand by streamlining the tasks involved in dealing with the issue. By providing transparency into the supply chain, you’ll be able to quickly identify the affected product and respond fast to avoid further damage.
5. More flexibility and agility
In a competitive food and beverage landscape that’s highly vulnerable to disruptions—as proven by the pandemic-related events of recent years—the ability to act quickly in response to changing market conditions and evolving consumer and regulatory demands can be a key component of standing out and growing market share.
By leveraging business process automation, you can improve the flexibility and agility of your organisation, using scalable software that allows you to act with speed to meet rapidly changing requirements.
From adhering to updated regulatory compliance to bringing new and innovative products to market fast, workflow automation can significantly improve your ability to adapt to different production needs, adapt to the latest trends, and maximise your results.
| To learn more about how Bizcaps is empowering food and beverage companies with streamlined master data management tools, visit https://www.bizcaps.com/bpm-business-process-manager/ |