Part of the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is meant to help prevent wide-scale public health issues by requiring companies worldwide to take steps to prevent intentional adulteration of the food supply. This new law adds to the burden of the food and beverage industry, as it already faces numerous challenges in addition to FDA regulations, including volatile supply and demand.
But Sage Enterprise Management (Sage X3) can help. While it can be tailored to fit any industry, it offers unique advantages to food and beverage businesses.
The new law requires both domestic and foreign food facilities to create and maintain a written food defense plan that assesses their potential vulnerabilities to deliberate contamination with the intent to cause wide-scale public health harm. Facilities have to identify and implement mitigation strategies to address their vulnerabilities, establish food defense monitoring procedures and corrective actions, verify that the system is working, ensure that personnel assigned to these areas receive appropriate training, and maintain very specific records. Although these new regulations add extra responsibilities to food and beverage businesses, the law will strengthen the safety of an increasingly global and complex food supply network.
Now that this law has passed, your food and beverage business has more things to consider when looking for a new business management solution. You should look for a vendor that can provide process improvement methods through key data management, quality control, and traceability benefits.
Following are 10 ways Sage Enterprise Management keeps you in compliance with the FDA:
Excellent customer service prevents customers and prospective customers from going to your competitors. Sage Enterprise Management manages promised delivery dates, lead times, docking and packing requirements, shipping and tracking information, and more. It also offers easy access to customer information, so when a customer has a problem, you can answer it immediately.
Manage contacts, set appointments, monitor marketing campaigns, and get insights into customers and orders anywhere and anytime. Sage Enterprise Management combines CRM with the power of mobile technology to make your sales and marketing efforts stronger than ever.
Managing, training, and retaining qualified staff is a significant challenge. Sage Enterprise Management’s industry-leading, customizable human resources management solution integrates payroll, benefits, recruiting, employee self-service, and analytics to help you maximize every dollar you invest in employees.
Managing inventory is critical to customer satisfaction and profitability; it also reduces the loss of perishable goods. Sage Enterprise Management provides inventory management solutions so you can understand all aspects of your inventory, including product profitability, order to cash, and warehouse operations so that you can stock, pick, and fulfill orders more efficiently.
Manage and collaborate with suppliers using Sage Enterprise Management's multi-language and global currency abilities, including forward and backward traceability. Get data-driven demand forecasting with X3's business management, inventory, and business intelligence solutions that increase your supply chain visibility and optimize processes to buy and sell products.
Managing your operations is the key to your success. Sage Enterprise Management simplifies traceability, recall management, allergen reporting, and more. It also manages and optimizes all phases of your operations to improve efficiency, speed up turnaround times, and increase productivity.
The accuracy of Enterprise Management's data offers full traceability of products and ingredients from manufacture through to point of sale. See where promotions have influenced profits and how a single ingredient change within a recipe will affect the financial outlook as a whole. This improves your ability to make strategic pricing and product mix decisions by clearly identifying which products and customers are the most profitable.
Anyone working in the food industry understands the increased pressure to be compliant with various regulatory bodies and laws. Sage Enterprise Management simplifies the compliance process by ensuring a detailed audit trail of each lot number. The software can hold raw materials in a quality-hold queue and only release a particular lot of materials once it has passed a quality test. You can also track both raw ingredients and finished products through their life cycles; the software automatically maintains a detailed audit trail of transactions.
Manage cash flow, compliance, profitability, fixed assets, and accounting processes such as general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and cash management. Sage Enterprise Management's accounting and finance solutions give you the financial insight you need to make critical decisions.
Sage Enterprise Management has a single integrated database that holds all your data and makes it available in real time. This ensures that your information is always accurate and reliable and allows you to respond to shifts in demand easily and efficiently. You have an accurate view of your stock and, by factoring in sales forecasts, your resources are always in tune with market fluctuations. The food market is a complex industry with multi-buy offers and seasonal trends; even the weather can affect stock levels. Sage Enterprise Management tracks price variations, stock levels at multiple manufacturing sites, and movement between warehouse and production.
All these benefits don’t function in isolation but rather come together to create the essential parts of an ERP system. ERP systems work their best when they can integrate all areas of your business to streamline processes and highlight cost-saving opportunities, enabling the growth of your company.
Have questions about an ERP for your food and beverage business? Contact the experts at Southeast Computer Solutions today.