ProcessForce for food and beverage businesses provides powerful tools to manage production operations. In this interview, we spoke with Martin Gore of ProcessForce, to understand how food manufacturers can leverage ProcessForce to optimize their processes.
The food and beverage supply chain is complex, with many moving parts that must synchronize to deliver products safely, efficiently, and profitably. ProcessForce is purpose-built software that gives food producers control over their processes at every step – from ingredients to finished goods.
We discuss with Martin how ProcessForce helps food companies:
- Streamline production planning, scheduling, and work instructions
- Ensure compliance with safety and quality protocols
- Connect sensory evaluations to production data
- Generate forecasts based on raw materials stock and previous demand
- Track key performance indicators for continuous improvement
Q: What does ProcessForce do?
A: ProcessForce focuses on the issues of regulation and compliance. In particular, for companies that have to be BRC audited, features such as batch traceability, whilst from a business process side, features such as quality control, shelf life and expiry dates are extremely beneficial.
Q: Where did the idea for ProcessForce come from?
A: We found there was a hole in the market place for an industry focused solution for SAP Business One within the process manufacturing segment. For example Food and Beverage is a key vertical that we have focused on.
Q: What makes ProcessForce work particularly well with SAP Business One?
A: We offer a seamless user experience and leverage the SAP Business One platform to provide value to our customers and partners.
Q: Which types of businesses tend to benefit most from ProcessForce for food with SAP Business One?
A: At a high level process manufacturing enterprises, covering verticals such as: food and beverage, personal care, life sciences including chemicals and pharmaceuticals and pet nutrition.
Q: Which features of ProcessForce for food and beverage, do businesses tend to find most advantageous?
A: The overall management of key master data and business processes for example FIFO and FEFO rules, yield, recipes, coproducts, batch tracking, quality control and compliance to name a few
Q: What are food businesses usually looking for when they come across ProcessForce?
A: They tend to be looking for a solution that addresses the specific needs of their industry. There are many reasons why businesses are looking to change their existing systems, one specific is to meet the increasing needs around BRC regulations and to reduce the cost of batch related data management.
Food and beverage businesses today are driven by tighter and tighter regulations. People like to know what they are eating and with extended global supply chains, food and beverage businesses have to know where the ingredients are coming from and where they are going to, which can be difficult to manage.
Q: How are ProcessForce customers finding the system handles all food compliance issues effectively?
A: With ProcessForce for food, we offer many features and functions, for example we make batch traceability easy , by visualising the supply chain, and providing insights how a product has been produced.
Q: How does the system do this?
A: ProcessForce for food records what has been bought from the supplier – batch number, expiry date etc, when and where the batch was consumed in production and where the final product has been sold. Then when you have a customer complaint, you can record the complaint reason codes, and via a single click see where the how the batch was produced and what went into it.
View video demonstration of ProcessForce Batch Traceability.
Q: How have sales of ProcessForce for food businesses risen over the past year?
A: Our customer base grew by 400% in 2013, with 52% of new customers being food or food related businesses.
Q: Why would you say sales are increasing/decreasing?
A: For a number of reasons. There are more and more food companies in the marketplace and they all have to meet the increasing pressures of regulation and compliance. Also, many ERP systems traditionally don’t have the level of functionality that a food companies require
Q: What’s next for ProcessForce for food businesses?
A: Our plan is to include new enhancements and leverage SAP HANA to provide innovative industry focused extreme applications, for example a 360 degree next generation batch traceability solution.
For more information on how ProcessForce for food can help your business to improve efficiencies and accelerate growth, contact Signum Solutions.
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