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Inventory management: creating a lean approach to food manufacturing

Batch tracking Food manufacturers Inventory management Inventory management software Lean manufacturing
3 Minute
Melanie blog profile picture

by Melanie

Posted 29/09/2017

A lean approach is fundamental shift in thinking; it moves away from traditional manufacturing and towards a more systematic approach. It is a business model focused on the reduction of any non-value adding or wasteful activities whilst simultaneously adding customer value. You can achieve this with a powerful inventory management system, read on to find out how.

1. Powerful food inventory manufacturing systems

With powerful inventory management software, each element of the food manufacturing supply chain are identified and factored into calculations. Components like packaging, labelling and storage can create just as much strain on the bottom line as raw materials. By eliminating guesswork and the potential of user input error, food manufacturers can accurately balance expenditures and introduce visibility into the business. This is powerful as you can pinpoint opportunities and turn threats from weaknesses to strengths, enabling better business decisions.

2. Batch control

Complementary to forecasting costs is batch tracking. This is the ability to track every ingredient and component involved in the creation and distribution of food manufacturing. Batch tracking provides great insight into where ingredients originated, when they were collected or harvested, and when they were shipped to your facility. Too much of one component can mean wasted product and storage space. Too little signals lost sales opportunities. Both of these are detrimental to the bottom line and can potentially cripple food manufacturers. Leveraging the powerful food manufacturing systems of batch-tracking capabilities alleviates these issues, allowing food manufacturers the ability to stock precisely the amount of food required now while accounting for seasonal sales trends to prepare for peaks and dips in demand as well as watching out for expiry dates to health regulation components.

3. Use of software

This type of food manufacturing software can provide for upcoming and small to medium food manufacturers for a fraction of the price, whereas this kind of functionality had previously been limited to that large corporations that had expensive enterprise resource planning systems and functions. Added onto an existing accounting platform, inventory management software can make counting, tracking and managing stock seamless, keeping your finished products at the centre of attention and allowing for maximum profitability and use of resources. Powerful inventory management systems are carving the way forward for best practices in the food manufacturing industry in a lean way. That is decreasing the resources needed and minimising waste to increase the customer value for finished goods. Inventory management takes away the arduous effort of having to manage raw ingredients, health regulations, expiry dates, recipe creation and packaging and labelling, so that time spent in these areas can be better spent elsewhere such as marketing initiatives. Powerful inventory management systems in the way of food manufacturing software can help harvest the perfect growth of the food manufacturing industry in a way that is forward thinking and productive. Do not get left behind with manual and arduous processes when there is simply no need for obsolete business models.
Melanie blog profile picture

By Melanie

Article by Melanie Chan in collaboration with our team of Unleashed Software inventory and business specialists. Melanie has been writing about inventory management for the past three years. When not writing about inventory management, you can find her eating her way through Auckland.