Inventory

How does an ERP help food traceability?

Ash Baggott

Are you producing the safest, highest quality products? If there was a sudden contamination or outbreak within your facility, and you were required to provide all the tracking and reporting around food traceability; how long would it take you?

If your business needs to keep track of food production, are you currently taking advantage of ERP technology to mitigate risks and maximise profits, rather than waiting for a tragedy to happen? In this competitive era, one mistake can be the difference between losing or retaining a customer base. The modern consumer wants to be able to know exactly where their food came from, are you are able to tell them?

An ERP system – designed with your product in mind – can provide the required visibility into food safety, quality control and food traceability. Food and beverage forms need to be proactive in putting processes and procedures in place to be able to manage food safety and traceability.

Operating in an industry that suffers from regular product recalls, your firm will need to demonstrate that it can track its products and ingredients within – including raw ingredients to the finished goods – in upstream and downstream channels.

What advantages does an ERP have for the food industry?

Better inventory management

As a food manufacturer, an ERP system will enable you to anticipate demand, driven by factors such as pricing, trends and even the weather. It allows you to adjust procurement, stock, production and even product destinations.

An ERP can also help your business find the optimum balance and minimise loss around spoilage and lost/missed sales.

Quality improvements

Although food safety is the number one concern amongst consumers, food quality is also a rising concern. Supplying items that are consistently high quality is vital to maintaining your reputation and building a sustainable business.

You need to be able to monitor and analyse all of the variables that can influence product quality generate streams of valuable data, an ERP can highlight critical patterns and help mitigate any issues.

Be more compliant

An increase in compliance and expectation from regulatory bodies are becoming more, and more strict. This implies that your firm needs a rigorous data collection process, targeted at a thorough and frequent collection of data. The more complete datasets are, the more improved your compliance will be and you’ll be able to provide a more accurate reports to authorities.

Happy consumers

Educate your consumers to understand critical, correct information, you can allow them to make more informed choices and actively decide that they want to be one of your customers. Providing them with full food traceability of your products will increase trust and extend the life cycle of your client-base.

Safer products

In the event of a food safety incident or malicious at, it’s vital to be able to find the source of the problem quickly, and reassure consumers with the facts. You’ll need a full product traceability in place, to identify and isolate all possible sources initially, while withdrawing all potentially affected items from sale while you investigating the threat. You’ll want to reassure your customers that you care about their well-being.

A powerful cloud ERP system like, Holded’s #1 ERP software, you’ll be able to remove the guesswork from food traceability production, processing and distribution, allowing you to be a more agile company, whilst pleasing your customers and satisfying regulators.

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