How To Choose An Ideal ERP Solutions For Food & Beverage Businesses

by Rob Stephen getaprogrammer

Not every industry can be perfectly served with a generic ERP solution. With ERPs becoming widely industry-specific, this article provides a guide to choose one for the food and beverages businesses.

The new recipe for success for the partners and players in the food and beverage industry is a befitting ERP software solution. While Australia’s food and beverage industry are said to be strictly regulated with numerous norms like HACCP, quality control etc, the main pressure is on the producers and dealers. They have to take care minutely that their food products are produced by adhering to all the standards and rules.

However, there’s one easy solution for them: ERP Software. With it, they can deal with major challenges such as traceability of raw food items and processed foods, product quality, weighing scale and a proper food-delivery network. While businesses in the food and beverage segment can easily get one suitable ERP developed with Odoo or other application from an ERP development company, the idea of this article is to provide a fruitful guidance to them on selecting a specific ERP.

Here are the crucial things that a company dealing in food and beverages should be considering while getting an ERP software.

HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Programme)

This is the food safety programme devised by food authorities to assure the safety of every food item being traded and sold. It bears a risk assessment plan too which companies should be followed by the food processing and distribution companies. So, the ERP software meant for the industry should specifically have the elements for traceability, monitoring, procedures assessment, data collection and reports generation. Companies should have a full-proof system to show their products are as per the HACCP standards and rules.

Weighing scale integration

This is a basic feature requirement in food industry ERPs. The weighing scale integration with the ERP will assist the food producers, dealers, and distribution firms with an automatic weighing system along with the system of tracking all other information from the product labels at the time of sale.

Run management

While every food processing and distribution firm thrives with a common goal, that is, delivering the fresh items to the customers on time, the ERP solution needs to assist them in that. It should be featured with run management to forecast demands, plan production wisely and manage the supply and distribution of products.

Recipe control

For the food dealers, it is quite a back-breaking job and need extracting a lot of technical information about the food being processed such as formula, the quantity of ingredients, etc. Also, there are different units of measurements which vary from one food item to another. So, there’s a need for a feature in ERP which can keep a database of all recipes and formulas, to ensure the consistency of food quality in every lot of production.

While companies struggle real hard in getting a righteous ERP solution that will help the adhere to food regulatory and compliance requirements, considering these will help them meet the safety standards well.

Rob Stephen is one of the dedicated Odoo developers in Australia who work for GetAProgrammer, a visionary software solutions provider offering well-versed, flexible and failproof Odoo ERP solutions businesses in different fields.