How Food Companies Can Transform Data for Better Decision-Making
For food and beverage businesses like yours, taking advantage of the seemingly endless amount of data that comes with your daily operations is critical. From production and inventory to finances and shipments, there are important numbers to capture and analyze in virtually every area.
That being said, simply logging these figures is not enough—not in today’s hyper-competitive environment, anyway. Your business needs to not only track this information with the right tools, but you also need to truly analyze your findings to gain real insights.
So what does it take to really dominate your data?
Be comprehensive
Some numbers are readily available and easy to collect, but the fact that this low-hanging fruit exists shouldn’t bias your procedures. Take advantage of sensors, cameras, scanners and other technology to round out your approach to monitoring and get a complete picture.
Just as important is that you use a single, unified system for all the data that you track. Isolated spreadsheets saved to a single employee’s local hard drive—or worse, a pen-and-paper record maintained by only a few individuals—need to be eliminated.
Be accurate
Going hand-in-hand with the above principles would be making sure that the numbers you capture are correct. Even the most complete of data-capturing systems becomes a liability if the facts and figures in it can’t be trusted to be accurate.
With that in mind, it’s a good idea to minimize the risk of human error. Technology is your friend here— computers were designed to efficiently manage information, and they enable you to take advantage of automation, including prompts to remind employees of their next steps and notifications when potential issues arise. This eases your business’s reliance on imperfect manual processes.
Be current
How fast is fast enough? In the food and beverage world, you need to have real-time figures in front of you in order to act with the agility that the industry requires.
That means having up-to-the-minute reports at the push of a button. Don’t settle for less, or you could be caught in a position where your business simply can’t react quickly enough.
Be accessible
It was important in the pre-pandemic world, but now that the reality of COVID-19 has settled in, it’s more evident than ever before how critical it is that your data is stored online, in the cloud. Limiting access to just those on the floor at your facilities is a thing of the past.
It’s also vital that your system is device-agnostic, and this is most easily achieved by making web browser the default interface. What’s more, robust redundancy and backup measures should be in place to ensure a crash doesn’t cripple your operations.
Crashes are far more likely to occur if your business tries to host the system. It’s too critical to your business, too difficult to achieve and too far removed from the things your people should be focused on. Instead, you need a data and solution expert on your side. An expert who can help you achieve your goals. An expert who can provide the integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that manages every facet of your organization and fits your unique needs.
Turningdataintoinsights
There are two keys to fully utilizing the data that you capture and leveraging it for tangible results. First is to filter out the noise—not everyone needs to have access to all of the numbers, and setting the right permissions for your employees will help reduce the amount of irrelevant information they’d otherwise have to sift through.
Second is to make sure your reports are not only easy to generate but also simple to understand. Finding the right ways to visualize certain kinds of data will make it easier to make connections and plot the right course of action.
Other key benefits to look for in an ERP are the ability to assign and track tasks and email integration. Both of these measures help to ensure that staff have in front of them all of the facts and figures necessary to do their jobs. How labor and overhead costs are applied: Costs accumulate based on the quantity produced at a specific work center.
Buildingadata-drivenorganization
Youwanttoempoweryourbusinesswiththeabilitytomakedecisionsbasedonfacts,notintuition.Here’sa simpleplanthatcanhelpyoureachthatgoal:
1. Start with the ERP software—find an industry-specific solution backed by a company with expertise and a track record for acting as a partner to its clients. This is a long-term investment that will be the foundation for your digital transformation.
2. Work with your provider to customize the reports and dashboards for your unique situation.
3. Dive into not just the raw reports, but the advanced analytics as well. That could be trend lines or patterns, seasonal variations, or performance history for certain products.
4. Train your workers on the system thoroughly, and then insist that they put it to good use. Encourage them to start with the relevant information and formulate action items and recommendations from there.
5. Flesh out a process for continual improvement. Involve everyone in your new data-driven policies and processes so they all feel ownership over the transformation and can see the benefits first-hand.
6. Identify the early successes that your new system yields and share with your whole team to really have them buy in on the “new normal” of this information age.
7. Enact a concrete procedure for doing away with the old systems and documents so that no one is tempted to slip back to the “old ways.” You wouldn’t want the mixture to get muddled by a rogue spreadsheet that’s outlived its usefulness.
Worth the effort
Those seven steps are easy to conceptualize—putting them into practice will take hard work and considerable effort from your team, top to bottom. But once you reach your goals, you’ll reap the rewards.
Intelligent decision-making grounded in data analysis will open new doors and increase revenue in ways you may not even be able to imagine yet. Take those first steps toward harnessing the power of your information by contacting Aptean today.
About Aptean
Aptean is one of the world’s leading providers of industry-specific software. Our enterprise resource planning and supply chain solutions are uniquely designed to meet the needs of specialized manufacturers and distributors, while our compliance solutions serve specific markets such as finance and life sciences. With both cloud and on-premise deployment options, Aptean’s products, services and unmatched expertise help businesses of all sizes, across many industries, to scale and succeed. For more information, visit www.aptean.com.
