Meat, poultry and seafood processors and distributors content with challenges, including providing the freshest products to meet consumer and regulatory demands all while cutting costs to maximize narrow margins. The appropriate enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions help mitigate the effects of these challenges and provide long-term benefits such as increased efficiency, improved visibility, reduced operation expenses, expanded delivery channels, enhanced customer relationships and greatly improved information sharing and performance management. It’s no wonder today’s leading meat, poultry and seafood companies view ERP as a strategic investment.
However, the risks to an organization for not making a well-informed, industry-specific selection and engaging in a well-planned ERP implementation can result in huge unanticipated costs, extensive configuration and integration, extended project timelines, and poor ROI. Therefore, it’s critical to first determine if your organization needs an ERP solution.
If your organization is experiencing one or more of these business conditions, it is time to seriously consider implementing an appropriate, industry-specific ERP solution.
1. Fast organizational growth: You have recently opened multiple production or distribution centers in various locations, and there is an increase in production, processes and workforce.
2. Lack of Operational Transparency: You are not able to easily access real-time data and reporting on orders, inventory, production, and delivery from any point in your supply chain operations. You face challenges accessing critical company performance data.
3. Lack of control over catch weight management and cost allocation: You face problems in automatically and accurately managing products’ actual weights for order, production and shipment to ensure accuracy in procure to pay, order to cash, production, inventory management and accounting. You struggle to deliver the most accurate costing, including grade percentages, fixed weight ratio, fixed end percentages and fixed end-value contributions for multiple bills of materials/disassembly bills of materials.
4. Utilization of manual processes to manage production and minimize waste: You are using spreadsheets and other manual tracking and data collection methods to manage meat, poultry or seafood production such as recipe scaling and blend/cut optimization. It is a challenge to ensure the most streamlined and efficient way to manage waste with production processes and BOM structures.
5. Lack of sufficient way to manage HAACP and other regulatory requirements: It is difficult to automatically manage your organization’s Critical Control Points (CCPs), respond quickly to requests for lot information, view lot information forward and backward and at a granular level, and attain a real-time view of products from farm-to-shelf.
6. Little ability to track and accurately manage: You are unable to accurately track and manage key activities from trade promotions to consumer feedback and preferences in order to more effectively and proactively compete in the market.
7. Your current systems are disparate and becoming obsolete: Your existing solution(s) are disparate and no longer support your organization’s enterprise operations, having a negative impact on growth, performance and profitability.
