Future-Proof Your Food and Beverage Business with Dynamics 365

The food and beverage industry has been facing turbulent shifts due to the soaring post-war inflation, with food wastage significantly affecting profitability. This blog synthesizes how digitizing food and beverage business with Dynamics 365 can enhance profitability.

Food wastage is a major concern in the food and beverage industry, as it negatively impacts business profitability and largely contributes to carbon emissions. According to a report from S&P Global Ratings, each year $1 trillion worth of food is waste, and this waste contributes to 10% of global emissions that harm our atmosphere. The reason for food wastage is linked towards fluctuating consumer demands. The recent surge in inflation has affected the buying power. Hence, the food and beverages industry has faced a sudden surprising shift from consumers frequently eating out to preparing food at home.

In short, due to the volatile demands and considerations for sustainability, the food and beverages industry needs digital solutions that can enhance its processes to empower it to fight off volatile demand and enhance its productivity.

Why Does the Food and Beverages Industry Need ERP?

Processes in the food and beverages industry are complex and time-sensitive due to the concise expiry windows of perishable products. With its complex processes, there are a plethora of problems faced by the industry that highlight the need for an efficient Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. Moreover, a digital solution enables food and beverage businesses to drive efficient operations and make data-driven decisions.

Inefficient Inventory Management: With the perishable nature of inventory items and the unprecedented demand fluctuations, businesses need demand forecasting and plan inventories accordingly.

Stick-Thin Profit Margins: Traditionally, the profit margins in food and beverages are stable but small. Therefore, for companies to sustain with stick-thin profit margins, they need to minimize loss-incurring practices as much as possible.

Disrupted Supply Chains: Due to the time-sensitive time-to-market deadlines, food and beverages businesses need the supply of raw materials synchronized with the production demand. Otherwise, the wastage becomes significant, negatively impacting business profitability. Factors like raw material shortage must be foreseen in advance to enhance supply chain visibility and efficiency.

Unprecedented Food Wastage: Due to the fluctuations in consumer demands, buying behaviors, and manufacturing delays, a lot of items get expired and turn into food waste. Food waste negatively impacts the environment and becomes a pressure point for food and beverage companies.

Failed Allergen Management: Food and beverages industry needs proper tools and proactive approaches to meticulously manage allergens at the time of production to meet compliance guidelines. Failure to effectively manage allergens and ingredient traceability results in health risks for consumers.

Data Silos: Data is the key to digitizing processes and disjointed processes often cause data silos. The inability to unify data to drive strategies results and food quality often gets compromised.

How Can Dynamics 365 Help the Food and Beverages Industry?

Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s leading Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) application that efficiently streamlines business processes by digitizing each workflow, from manufacturing and supply chain to finance and customer services. As a cloud-based solution, it unifies data from disparate data sources, for visibility and incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning to make business processes data-driven and intelligent.

By implementing Dynamics 365 as a one-stop solution, food and beverages companies are combine their business processes under the umbrella of Dynamics 365. Its sophisticated suite of enterprise-level applications caters to all types of food and beverage businesses, from manufacturing to packaging or distribution ones. Some of the key benefits are listed down below:

• Seamless recipe management, to optimize available raw materials.
• Integrated industry-specific BOMS to assist in recipe flexibility.
• Various UOMs are included for top-notch measuring.
• Data-driven seasonal demand forecasting, depending on the location.
• Transparent inventory management with accurate quantity reporting.
• Efficient inventory control with batch traceability for top-notch expiry tracking.
• Robust scheduling functionality to cater to various scheduling requirements.
• Industry and location compliant regulatory practices
• Ultimate supply chain transparency with two-way traceability features.
• Accurate shelf-life tracking with the aim of reduction in waste.
• Customized labelling facility, complaint with industry guidelines.
• AI powered intelligent ingredient selection to ensure top quality manufacturing.

Dynamics 365 Key Capabilities for Food and Beverages Industry

Dynamics 365 has a modular structure that makes it highly customizable with its ability to integrate with multiple applications. This carries a huge advantage for food and beverages businesses as they can digitally manage all aspects by integrating their Dynamics 365 dashboards with other Dynamics 365 applications. However, if such businesses get a customized package, then their implementation partner can build a customized ERP for them.

Dynamics Solution and Technology provides a tailor-made implementation for Dynamics 365, catered especially to food and beverages businesses. Its key capabilities include:

Manufacturing Management: Be it in-house or outsourced manufacturing, Dynamics 365 provides seamless manufacturing management capabilities to food and beverages businesses. It introduces efficiency in a cost-effective manner by making manufacturing processes AI-driven. AI helps in maintaining consistent quality and flow of materials according to preset KPIs (key performance indicators).

Financial Management: Stick-thin profit margins a sore reality for food and beverage businesses. Dynamics 365 provides productive financial managementar by maximizing profits, tracking liquidity, and managing cash flows. It ensures the company’s financial situation complies with the regulations and mitigates fines. It expertly provides planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting functionalities.

Analytics and Reporting: Data analysis is an integral part of business continuity. Food and beverage businesses are inherently dependent on reporting and analytics to meet fluctuating consumer demands head-on. Dynamics 365 easily integrates with business intelligence tools like Power BI to analyze and visualize data, empowering business analysts to drive quick reports and data-drive strategies to cater to various problems.

Supply Chain Management: Supply chains for perishable items are time-sensitive and complex. Dynamics 365’s supply chain management capabilities are designed to cater to a complex time sensitive supply cycle. By leveraging AI and ML capabilities, Dynamics 365 makes supply chains intelligent and transparent enough for users to foresee any delay and plan accordingly. It helps in evaluating seasonal demands and procuring raw materials accordingly.

Product Development: Food and beverage companies need constant product development to cater to a wider audience and keep up with emerging trends. Dynamics 365 uses artificial intelligence to aid businesses in market research, concept validation, prototyping and validation.

Order Management: By integrating a robust POS (point of sales) system, Dynamics 365 allows a seamless order management experience for companies. It enables the user to take an order, process it, track its progress and coordinate with the customer from a one dashboard. Due to its unified data capability, Dynamics 365 order management allows automated inventory management.

Dynamics 365 Implementation for Food & Beverage by Dynamics Solution and Technology

As Microsoft’s Gold and Solutions partner, Dynamics Solution and Technology can customize Dynamics 365 as an ERP for your food and beverage business. Before the implementation, we evaluate your food business based on its ERP needs. Our expert team of technical and functional experts set key parameters according to which the implementation will be expected to yield results. Lastly, our support team remains with you until we identify the Dynamics 365 implementation for your food business a total success.

Our portfolio of digitally transformed businesses from every sector, across the Gulf and MENA regions ascertain our commitment to digital excellence. Contact us now for a no obligation consultation and see how your business can scale up with an ERP implementation.