Food Companies: Reduce Time to Market by a Factor of Ten

Excelling at strategic supply chain management, including planning and optimization, creates a recipe for fast, efficient and profitable operations, providing a competitive advantage for any food or beverage company.

As a food manufacturer, you face a big list of tough supply chain challenges including long raw material lead times, volatile commodity price fluctuations, safety and quality issues, demand uncertainty and seasonality, high promotional activity, product perishability, frequent new product introductions (NPIs), exacting distribution requirements, complex manufacturing constraints, strict legal and regulatory requirements, and increasing customer expectations.

Without a doubt, the supply chain organizations in food and beverage companies face mounting pressure to reduce costs, add more value and do more with fewer resources. A convergence of strategic supply chain management, people, process, data, and technology capabilities, including those listed below, makes the timing ripe to take your food and beverage supply chain to the next level. Once your supply chain planning foundation is established, these six areas are the logical places to focus if you want to develop more mature supply chain practices and add more value to your organization:

• Automation through artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities
• More mature and user friendly supply chain planning and optimization solutions
• Proven supply chain optimization algorithms
• Access to richer internal and external structured and unstructured data
• Technology savvy workforce—Millennial/Generation Z

This white paper outlines steps you should take to reap the greatest harvest from strategic supply chain management investments including: supply optimization; multi-echelon inventory optimization (MEIO); manufacturing optimization; advanced sales and operations planning (S&OP); digital transformation; and artificial intelligence and machine learning.