Boost Manufacturing Performance Using Open Source ERP

How food and beverage companies can increase business resiliency, improve operations, and maximize profits

Optimize under any circumstance

In today’s dynamic, complex business environment, food and beverage manufacturers need the ability to rapidly respond to changing market demands, consumer trends, and external influences. With data-driven analytics and insight, companies can identify trends immediately and adapt operations to maintain or increase revenue, while at the same time reducing waste due to product spoilage or logistics and manufacturing challenges.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic illustrates a severe disruption. While the number of confirmed cases continues to rise, the food and beverage industry, which is pegged to reach a value of nearly $9.4 trillion by 2022, has been forced to quickly adjust to volatile consumer demand due to the crisis.

Executive leaders are re-evaluating systems to take control of their supply chain and deliver products faster, with fewer resources, and at a lower cost. Manufacturing goods, as well as tracking customers, financials, and end-to-end business functions, require new and enhanced processes, powered by innovative solutions so that fast-moving changes become a business driver versus a liability.

That’s why investing in an open source ERP solution makes sense for small and mid-size food and beverage manufacturers. Customer demands are changing daily. Open source ERP solutions, combined with expertise from OSI, paves the way to proactively adapt to market forces and differentiate in the marketplace.

Manufacturing companies can ramp up to respond to demand with greater ease and agility. How? By integrating and streamlining mission-critical workflows, like order intake, raw materials management, production, quality assurance, distribution, and sales. They can adjust strategies in near-real-time using trusted data and insights to deliver goods when, where, and how their retailers and end consumers prefer. In addition, they can extend their business with new products to evolve into a hyper-responsive, agile operation.

Open source ERP advances:

• Material requirements planning
• Product development, adaptation, and scheduling
• Sales and inventory management
• Distribution and logistics handling
• Regulatory compliance and reporting

Improve production with open source

Food and beverage companies, particularly small and mid-size businesses, face enormous pressure. Thinning margins, complex supply chains, traceability requirements, and changing consumer preferences, including sustainability trends and eco-friendly packaging, make rapid response a problematic undertaking. Also, new regulatory and compliance requirements may arise out of the COVID-19 pandemic that further impacts quality, packaging, and distribution.

Open source software provides enormous innovation opportunities to address these issues. This may be why in a recent survey, 86% of IT leaders say that the most innovative companies use enterprise open source

systems.

Specifically, open source ERP empowers leadership to make better decisions, including how to adapt products to changes in the market in near-real-time, as well as re-configure raw materials to support a new kind of customer. They can also move with speed to support new requirements, such as quality assurance checks, regulatory compliance, packaging changes, and decisions around outsourcing production processes.

At the heart of these capabilities lies the power to gain a 360 view of the business. This facilitates developing a winning strategy amid disruption. It allows cross-departmental tracking and delivering on changing consumer wants. Numerous departments and people leverage data and analysis to monitor performance, as well as identify interruptions and gauge impact.

Powerful reporting capabilities facilitate accurate inventory valuations, product and materials traceability, product lifecycle management, and managed contracts for manufacturing, including make-to-order or highly customized, real-time product creation. Open Source synchronizes these capabilities into a single, trusted planning and forecasting system.

Open source ERP overcomes:

• A lack of a consolidated view of business
• Supply chain waste and inefficiency
• Increased complications of inventory management
• New compliance requirements and regulations
• Demands for accurate product traceability.

OSI helps you respond with speed

OSI possesses the knowledge and frameworks to support business resiliency quickly. Food and beverage manufacturers can respond to volatile markets, fast-changing consumer demand, and increased complications of inventory management, specifically, due to higher volumes.

OSI’s experts will work quickly with you to assess and analyze your biggest challenges and roadblocks for growth and increased margins. The OSI team will collaborate with your staff to deploy strategies based on years of experience and using industry best practices. Highly skilled, cross-disciplined specialists configure and build a secure enterprise solution that will reduce operating costs, support tightening regulations, and provide high-quality output.

Unlike proprietary software, open source ERP allows you to adapt the technology to your organizational and industry needs. And OSI gives you a trusted partner with in-depth manufacturing experience.

You can tailor the enterprise modules you want to achieve significant business benefits while enjoying the freedom of flexible licensing without ongoing maintenance fees. Specifically, OSI provides reliable, proven consulting services to help companies:

• Understand their existing processes
• Identify gaps in growth
• Prioritize to build better business models
• Deliver value to the organization and consumer
• Reduce costs and increase opportunities
• Accelerating brand and category growth
• Transform volatility into a business driver

Run your business right

Responding to market demands and building a platform for growth requires digital transformation done right, built with powerful integrating technologies and leveraging in-depth expertise. Businesses can simplify, shorten, and enhance workflows to develop a lean manufacturing approach.

By combining open source solutions with OSI expertise, food and beverage manufacturers can minimize complexity to develop into a fast and responsive operation designed to service a volatile customer base. They can significantly increase manufacturing capabilities and shorten the time-to-market with enterprise-wide visibility and optimized processes. Executives, product managers, sales staff, and customer support representatives leverage a powerful suite of tools to make the best decisions possible, now and into the future.

What to learn more about optimizing your manufacturing business? Visit opensourceintegrators.com/manufacturing.