Automate Everyday Processes and Future-Proof Your Food Business with Centric PLM

Labor shortages are rampant in the food and beverage industry, with the food sector among those worst affected by the ‘Great Resignation’. In order to minimize operational disruptions and labor shortfalls while maximizing revenues, businesses need ways to better manage resources, increase efficiency and replace manual processes with automatic solutions.

Automation that is targeted to areas that are heavily dependent on repetitive and time-consuming manual processes can significantly reduce the strain associated with labor shortages by enabling teams to do more value-added work.

The effects of the pandemic continue to reverberate through the food and beverage industry, and have intensified as the world grapples with geopolitical conflicts, inflation, weather patterns wreaking havoc and worries that a recession is on the horizon. As food prices increase, some price-sensitive customers are turning their backs on brands they typically buy, pushing food and beverage brands and retailers to rethink the products they focus on. These global, systemic issues make it extremely difficult to adapt and plan ahead, and are too large to be affected by the actions of an individual business.

However, food and beverage businesses can cope with these powerful external forces by focusing on resiliency and maximizing the use of existing resources. Now more than ever, businesses need to improve efficiencies, increase productivity and free up time so that they are better equipped to ride out each storm and focused on making great products consumers love.

As in every industry, food and beverage businesses are under threat every day from hacking attempts, data breaches and phishing activities. Just one successful attack can have devastating effects on your company’s finances, operations and reputation.

Ensuring that basic security protocols are in place and followed by every member of staff, particularly in an era of hybrid and remote working, can minimize security risks so that your business can focus on making great products.

Featuring new tools developed in close partnership with food and beverage customers, the latest release of Centric PLM enhances Centric’s existing collaboration, automation and security features. The refinements added in v7.5 are intended to maximize the time and resources available to food and beverage brands, retailers and manufacturers to face challenging market conditions head-on and grow their business.

Conscious of the issues posed by labor shortages, the latest release introduces user-friendly automation tools to eliminate steps in everyday processes and save time. Data package templates for foods, SKUs and formulated materials automate the process of creating data packages, increasing productivity. Save time with a new recipe paste tool that enables users to quickly and accurately import recipes from an outside source into Centric PLM with a simple copy/paste action. This ensures accurate information can be created quickly in Centric PLM and speeds up the process of recipe creation while reducing errors.

Centric has always been highly focused on streamlining collaboration in order to improve efficiency and work smarter, and Centric PLM is already a highly collaborative software platform that integrates easily with many third-party systems. PLM introduces Microsoft Teams integration to enable Teams users to chat seamlessly while working within the Centric PLM interface, saving time and cutting the chance of errors that occur when jumping from one application to another. On the sourcing side, the new Supplier Support Request feature improves supplier collaboration with the ability to generate supplier requests at the Food level, SKU level, or Raw Materials level.

Many food and beverage businesses now have teams working remotely from multiple networks and devices. In response, Centric has introduced a critical layer of security with multi-factor authentication to log in to Centric PLM.

The big picture might be overwhelming sometimes but tackling everyday inefficiencies that eat up time and resources can have a significant effect on how well your food and beverage business is set up to handle the future. Getting systems in place that make processes more automated, efficient, collaborative and secure gives your business breathing room to adapt, plan ahead and change course when needed.