New Video Highlights Major IT Trends Facing Food Manufacturers

Curious about the top IT challenges facing food manufacturers?  Edgewater Fullscope, Sunrise Technologies and Microsoft have sponsored a new video featuring Gartner that discusses the impact of data, social media, consumer demand, global supply chains and more on food manufacturers and other consumer product goods (CPG) companies.

The segment, “CPG Talk in 2013:  Conversations CPG Companies Need to Have Now to Compete and Survive,” features Gartner analyst Nigel Montgomery and provides new considerations for executives at consumer goods companies on technology strategies needed to stay competitive in a global economy, including growing or maintaining market share.

Potency, Lot Genealogy and Product Sequencing, Oh My!

Why deep industry functionality is important for chemical, food and beverage and pharmaceutical companies

While the process manufacturing market is typically categorized as large and mature, it remains one of the most competitive and dynamic segments of manufacturing. In today’s frenetic global markets, process manufacturers must evolve to meet the challenges of changing market demands, the increasing commoditization of products, and the volatility of pricing in energy and raw materials.

Industry analysts define process manufacturing as in the middle of a transformation in which established systems with deep functionality on older technology are being displaced by more sophisticated and agile systems. A modernization is clearly underway.

The stakes have never been higher for process manufacturers as they replace or upgrade their systems: they need to boost quality, efficiency, safety, and regulatory compliance for maximum productivity and process control. For the major process segments including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food processing, pulp and paper, cosmetics and metals (industries whose business model is typically high volume, low margin), the ability to improve margins and to cost product and inventory based on the active ingredients central to their recipes are key to maintaining and improving competitive vitality.

Microsoft Dynamics AX is a leading ERP system for process manufacturers that offers broad and robust functionality, and it delivers low TCO through integration with other Microsoft products and technologies.

A new offering from Fullscope takes industry functionality to a deeper level. New Process Accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics AX provides powerful and detailed capabilities to help food and beverage, chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturers achieve the following:

• Manage active ingredients throughout their operations by enabling them to buy raw materials and cost finished goods more precisely by potency.
• Scale formulas up or down, automatically, by the identification of potent ingredients.
• Track lot inheritance.
• Define product sequencing, which is evaluated based on multiple characteristics, to reduce downtime and changeover costs in the production schedule.

Each Process Accelerator has been designed to address complex processes through an easy interface to automate activities as much as possible to reduce error.  Each one also provides flexibility for a manufacturer’s procurement, design, and regulatory compliance personnel so that they can easily value their inventory of materials for potency-dependent products, address factors that influence production, and trace with precision what was used in the production process. The idea is to automate processes for production and traceability as much as possible.

The Fullscope Process Accelerators for each industry integrate with the Process Industry layer of Microsoft Dynamics AX and provides new functionality concentrated in three basic areas:

1. Potency, including automated batch balancing for raw materials and potency-based purchase pricing
2. Lot genealogy
3. Product sequencing

This article uses the word “potency,” but some process industries may use the terms assay, concentration, or even others. The underlying technology in the Process Accelerator supports these potency-like types of requirements found across the chemical, food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries.

Coming next month:  The Power of Potency