In the food industry, there’s no doubt to the importance of having operations and internal systems that meet strict requirements to ensure continual production, minimum wastage and more importantly full traceability through production.
So, when choosing the system to streamline your operations, your processes can be more effective if you move to an ERP system that is designed to cover these requirements and that you choose a support partner who understands the specific needs of the food industry and can demonstrate experience and knowledge in this area.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV is equipped with the functionality you need in the food industry. Synergy Technology is an accredited Microsoft partner and provides expertise and support for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. With over 20 years’ experience in providing business solutions for SMEs across the UK, our professional Dynamics NAV team can help design and develop your ERP system to ensure it specifically meets the requirements of your business, now and for the future.
It’s your five a day!
We offer five key considerations when choosing a system that best fits your needs in the food industry:
- Maintaining traceability
- Meeting standards
- Reaching customers
- Scaleability to match growth
- Ensuring reliability, support and peace of mind.
ONE: Maintaining Traceability
From sourcing raw ingredients through production to distribution, you need a system that provides orders, bill of materials, manages product assembly, supply planning, and much more.
In addition, throughout the process food regulations must be met, so it is important that you choose an ERP system to meet all these specific requirements and can track all product activity.
Typical pain points in the food industry including ensuring produce remains on the shelf and gaining access to the right ingredients at the right price and managing cash flow, the cost of production and subsequently profit margins. Microsoft Dynamics NAV has a wealth of processing and management functionality including:
- Alternative Order Addresses, and Alternate Ship-to Addresses and Vendors
- Analysis Reports provide management with flexible and efficient ways to get pertinent information from the system to make day-to-day decisions with confidence.
- Inventory tracking of items in stock along with their units of measure, unit cost, pricing method, etc.
- Basic Payables enables generation of vendor ledger entries using General Journals.
- Bin organises warehouse inventory by assigning items to bins.
- Drop Shipment handles order shipments directly from the vendor to the customer through automation.
- Item Charges, Item Substitutions, Tracking and charges.
- Location Transfers track inventory as it is moved from one location to another and accounts for the inventory in transit and at multiple locations.
If you want a software that understands your business needs, then take a look at Dynamics NAV.
TWO: Meeting Standards
Ensuring your system manages batch scheduling, document management, compliance reporting and recording keeping is critical. The quality control functionality within your ERP is essential to enable inspection reminders, scheduled audits and regulatory reporting. Your ERP system needs to have documentation capabilities to carry out these important functions, including batch scheduling, recipe/document recording and compliance and quality control reporting.
It’s worth taking a look at the tools that can solve these issues — and seeing if they are standard or can be integrated into your system. If you are seeking a solution that ensures all your documentation across the business is shared, recorded and stored within one place, Microsoft Dynamics NAV can provide many of these requirements.
Dynamics NAV has document management and document capture facilities and automated data capture system as well as analysis reporting and e-services.
THREE: Reaching your customers
From dealing with paperwork to marketing your products, your ERP system needs to make a seamless journey across all functions.
Choosing a system that integrates with e-commerce software to reach your suppliers and customers 24 hours a day across multiple locations is the way forward. Integration with route mapping systems and mobile warehouse systems for stock control and delivery services is also desirable.
Dynamics NAV has a wide range of supply chain functionality including Item tracking and Bin and Pick, Workflows, Document management, Inventory, Shipping agents, Sales order management to ensure that your products are picked and dispatched correctly.
Dynamics NAV provides an out-of-the-box system that can then be developed. The system can be delivered via the Cloud or On-Premise model. By integrating it with Microsoft accredited add ons such as SANA commerce, you can also set up e-commerce and online functionality.
FOUR: Scaleability to Match Growth
When considering a suitable system for the food industry, a system that can grow with your business, manage multiple companies, locations and currencies as well as mobile and cloud technology is an essential consideration.
Many companies in food production may discover inherent or original manufacturing software makes it difficult to accommodate significant changes due to changes in technology, business growth and customer demands. For example, in the case of acquiring another line of business, it may become exceedingly complicated to integrate in an additional ERP system, and usually involves disrupting the stream of operations.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a robust, user-friendly ERP system designed for enhanced insight and control of financial and operational functionality. It’s also easy to configure, with close ties to Microsoft Windows and Office. The platform’s flexibility, integration capabilities and support of multi-currency, multi-language functions makes Dynamics NAV well-suited to providing business management capability to subsidiaries of larger parent food production companies.
FIVE: Ongoing Development and Support
System reliability, professional support and the subsequent peace of mind is critical to business development. In the food industry, responsive support to help reduce your downtime and reduce risk of damage or out of date goods and having access to a team of developers that can integrate systems and modules specific to food production needs is essential.
Getting ongoing support from a partner who knows all about Dynamics NAV and understands the requirements of food manufactures and distributors is therefore the final key to fulfilling your system requirements. Dynamics NAV is suitable for all business types in the food industry but particularly those with:
- Complex financial budgeting, analysis and reporting requirements
- A need for a flexible application to support very specific, often unique, business processes
- A requirement to manage complex manufacturing processes, including multiple suppliers, components and processes.
- Warehousing and distribution requirements, ensuring picking, packaging, processing and distribution processes are managed in a timely and accurate fashion.
- The necessity to consolidate data from multi-national, multi-site operations, requiring real-time access to accurate information.
- Compliance requirements and quality control that necessitates detailed levels of financial transaction traceability.
Synergy Technology is an accredited Microsoft partner and provides expertise and support for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Our experienced Dynamics NAV team can provides ongoing support services, professional training and can offer additional bespoke development for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
For further information on Microsoft Dynamics NAV and our support services contact Synergy Technology on 0345 456 0050.