As the recession looms, many food and beverage businesses are looking for ways to promote supply chain resilience. While this concept has grown over the past few years, we do want to note that this concept goes far beyond sourcing responsibly and flexibly. Working toward complete supply chain resilience requires a top-down change in your model extending across departments – implementing concepts for sustainability, locality, and strategy in every area of business. 

Below, we’re discussing how food and beverage ERP options specifically promote supply chain resilience in 2023 and will be exploring different benefits and questions commonly associated with both of these timely topics. 

How do food and beverage ERPs promote supply chain resilience? 

Supply chain resilience is an equally critical (and underrepresented) business concept across companies in all seasons of growth and scale. While it’s become increasingly important due to the global volatility we’re seeing from some of the world’s top producers, it still isn’t getting the attention it deserves – resulting in business closures, rising costs, and inefficiencies in large and small brands alike. 

Which leads to the question: How do food and beverage ERPs impact supply chain resilience? 

The answer? Significantly. We’ve listed a few of the core benefits below: 

1. Strategic insights for proactive management 

Resilience is a fantastic concept. However, it’s incredibly difficult to truly execute in the context of a rapidly growing business. 

With the widespread adoption of a quality food and beverage ERP system, you gain access to maximum visibility across departments. You also enjoy comprehensive reporting and analysis provided with down-to-the-minute accuracy via convenient cloud connectivity networks for your business. These features allow you to make more accurate, lower-risk decisions about the future of company operations, empowering you to take a proactive approach in the face of further instability in supply and manufacturing channels. 

To truly grasp the impact of this benefit, we have to look at McKinsey’s list of responses to supply chain instability. The idea of these responses is that they encapsulate the response evolution of most business owners dealing with supply chain instability. These proclivities include: 

• Firefighting Offering a more agile response but with limited success or impact on resiliency. This method addresses underlying, overlooked gaps. 

• Integrating/Streamlining: This is an active process that involves testing, iterating, and results in transformation in the short term. A good way to look at this is “resiliency in progress.” 
• Achievement: This is the temporary final form in which the company has attained resilience under the current circumstances. Additional planning and work is recommended for long-term success – generally requiring several “versions” of transformation.

An ERP tool virtually eliminates the temptation to resort to “firefighting,” or shortens the phase significantly. Business owners can then use these insights to streamline effectively and more efficiently moved toward true organizational transformation while reducing resource wastage. 

2. Effective adoption and integration assistance 

After you’ve used your ERP solution to set the vision and analyze your current gaps, it’s time to put your plan into action. Rather than rely on staff assistance only, you can leverage the tools in your current ERP solution to assist you. 

Integration can be challenging, especially for larger organizations. However, a quality comprehensive ERP solution will generally have some form of knowledge management, documentation, and training support. 

Using these tools, you can provide your staff with another avenue of reference as they begin their department-level overhauls of process and procedure – empowering them to take ownership, leadership, and a more definitive and firm approach to change. They won’t be waiting on approvals or dealing with nearly as many roadblocks as they would be with manual or fragmented methods. 

3. Centralized communication for easy vendor management 

As you transition to a more diversified and local vendor pool, communication is at risk of compromise. It’s easy to let threads slip under the rug, especially if you’re experiencing concurrent turnover or are in a period of rebuilding. Your ERP solution can provide you with centralized communication capacity, allowing your customer service staff to seamlessly manage and optimize vendor relationships with both outgoing and incoming vendor options. 

You’ll also be able to leverage the native CRM capabilities to further list, prioritize, segment, and manage your prospective vendors, streamlining your process and housing all records in a single, sleek system in your cloud network.

FAQs: Food and beverage supply chain resiliency 

Below are some commonly asked questions about food and beverage supply chain resiliency: 

1. How can you make your supply chain resilient in food and beverage businesses? 

There are many different strategies that you can use to promote resiliency in your supply chain. Common recommendations include acknowledging and looking for gaps in your current processes, simulating possible “fixes,” and continuing to iterate to determine which option is best, using data and insights from your tools and staff members. 

2. What are the pillars of supply chain resilience? 

There are common pillars agreed upon by strategic logistic experts and business people, which directly impact success with your supply chain management strategy. They include vulnerability, management culture, operations, procurement, and demand & visibility. Creating a plan that encompasses these areas of growth for your food and beverage business is critical for business success in these uncertain times. 

3. How can we achieve a resilient global chain? 

While the events on the global stage are outside of our locus of control, business owners can work to continue to mitigate risk wherever possible. This includes reviewing processes regularly to avoid gaps, practicing strategic pre-emptive risk management, and diversifying and domesticating the raw material supply pool.