Download Whitepaper:
Warehouse Automation in Food & Beverage Industry
Download Whitepaper:
Warehouse Automation in Food & Beverage Industry
As a food and beverage manufacturer or distributor, the value of your company lies in your inventory. Your inventory is what generates profit, what hours of work and countless raw materials are used to produce, and ultimately, the heart of your entire business. Since your inventory has the greatest impact on your bottom line, tracking it accurately and efficiently is essential to your company’s success.
While the importance of optimal inventory management is clear, small and midsize food and beverage companies still have a long way to go. 43% of small businesses still do manual inventory tracking, or even worse, do not track inventory at all (4)! And with more and more products being developed daily, inventory management is only becoming increasingly complicated. Customers are craving variety, which is why 54% of warehouses plan to expand the number of inventory SKUs carried over the next five years(8). Streamlining inventory management is imperative as you continue adding more product lines and increasing production. It is no wonder why inventory and network optimization technologies are the leading areas where leaders plan to invest in 2021. According to a recent survey, 54% of respondents plan to increase inventory and network optimization technologies investment, and 54% plan to invest in cloud technology (2). Inventory and network optimization tools also saw the largest YoY jump in companies reporting the technology as “in-use today,” with 45% of companies falling into that category, a 5% increase from the year prior (2). Food and beverage companies plan to invest in inventory management technology to decrease costs, improve customer satisfaction, boost productivity and accuracy.
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“The level of automation we now have is awesome. We can effectively track every part of our operations in real time and effectively manage
each facet of our omnichannel strategy. Visibility into our inventory at every location is crystal clear and we have instant access to all of our sales, customer and production data. As a result, we can make better decisions and better manage our growth process.”
– Nora Orozco, President, BED|STÜ
The good news is that SAP Business One’s Sales Analysis capabilities enabled us to evaluate the results of that campaign and then make adjustments for future promotions. Specifically, we can check the number of transactions, discount levels and net gain or loss per promotion and per location. We have to be very careful with how we spend our precious marketing dollars and the new system gives us the tools to optimize our investment in that area.
Softengine has been a key contributor to our rollout of SAP Business One. The company’s consultants were excellent and helped ensure that we had a successful implementation.
We decided to find a partner we could put our trust in. Softengine is very experienced and systemized in its approach. We were very confident we’d made the right choice. Small businesses might be intimidated by SAP software. What they don’t realize is that SAP offers solutions designed specifically for small to midsize companies like ours.
We feel like we are in great hands with Softengine and the SAP Business One system they installed. It’s nice to finally put all those unreliable ERP systems and redundant procedures in the rear-view mirror.
The Softengine team was able to tailor SAP Business One to deliver all the traceability Swabplus needed, including all the applicable reports. Softengine enhanced the core system to enable creation of new batch numbers if components don’t already have them and the option of batch-costing. They also added fields for escalation dates, expiration dates and additional inspection data (e.g., who inspected and when), which could be incorporated into each Certificate of Analysis.
Our experience with Softengine has been extremely positive. Any time we call for assistance, they always assign someone who’s highly professional and gets the job done quickly. Interestingly enough, I’ve become so much more educated about IT-related matters since working with the Softengine team on this project. Every time we need to upgrade the system, they walk me though all the steps to make sure that I completely understand what’s happening, which contributes to the overall success of the upgrade. It’s been a pleasure to work with them.