Catch weight is a standard term in the food and beverage industry mainly because of the challenges the concept presents. The nature of meat, seafood, and poultry makes managing catch weight in your processing an uphill task. Luckily, ERPs like GoldFinch provide a practical solution to tracking and managing catch weight items.
Read on to learn about catch weight and how enterprise resource planning or ERP helps manage it.
What is Catch Weight?
Catch weight is a product’s actual weight when sent to the consumer. It primarily applies to items with variable weights and varies in size, like steaks, meat, blocks of cheese, and seafood.
These items are frequently sold in bulk and priced based on weight instead of the standard units of measure. For example, the actual weight of the steak you want to buy determines the price. The same applies to fish, whose price depends on how much it weighs.
Consumers find catch weight management fair and practical since you get what you paid for. For the manufacturer, distributor, and seller, it ensures they charge the correct price for the product amount before shipping.
However, it can be complicated, especially when working with several products manually.
Why Is Catch Weight Management Crucial?
Established firms in the food industry understand the importance of managing catch weight. The following are some of the reasons your firm should account for catch weight during production:
Pricing
Catch weight management allows fair pricing of food products with variable weight by using the individual piece’s weight. It helps avoid averaging weight and corresponding prices, which often results in shortchanging the buyer or seller.
Let’s say you sold fish and decided to sell all fish fillets as if they weighed the same. Customers buying the heavier fillets will leave you shortchanged, while those buying lighter fillets will be overpaying. Integrating an ERP requires you to establish an ideal catch weight management system.
Customer Satisfaction
Once customers feel they are being “ripped off,” they’ll switch to other brands. It makes it crucial to ensure your brand reputation is intact and the customers are satisfied to avoid losing customers.
Establishing a transparent catch weight accounting system is the best approach to maintaining brand and product integrity. An ideal configuration would provide advanced functionalities like displaying the actual weight in the packaging to demonstrate the price difference.
Some companies prefer packing slightly more than the labeled content to avoid weight-related customer complaints. With the right technology, you can identify the perfect buffer to guarantee satisfaction to both parties.
What Is the Role of ERP in Catch Weight Management?
Catch weight management is a crucial function when dealing with goods in the food industry and is only effective when executed correctly. You can handle the process manually, but it will prove highly labor-extensive, error-prone, and costly. It would be wise to prepare to invest a lot of time and money in tracking each weight if you opt for the manual approach.
Implementing an ERP solution is the most practical approach to streamline catch weight management and other internal processes in the firm. For a sensible explanation, this section will focus on the meat industry.
An ERP built for the meat industry with weight management in mind automates and simplifies the tracking and reporting of inventory and sales that may vary in size. It saves meat producers time and resources while ensuring these units are appropriately labeled and their weights are accurate.
There are several ERP methods for catch weight management. These include two units of measurement: the inventory and the catch weight unit. The inventory unit refers to how much the unit weighs when stored, while the catch weight unit refers to its weight when sold and shipped.
Using an ERP in your catch management techniques allows the meat producers to capture exact weights and helps price them accordingly. It eliminates all the time-consuming and laborious calculations to deliver accurate inventory costs and product pricing. Some solutions even allow you to define the catch weight range to guarantee complete control over the process.
The meat ERP software also facilitates recording and maintaining catch weights for individual lots in the supply chain. It leaves no room for human errors, maintains data with tolerances, offers real-time inventory, and prompts alerts when the system exceeds the set range.
Integrating Catch Weights with ERP
Manufacturers in the food industry can track the measurements involved in catch weight management quicker, easier, and more accurately by integrating an ERP. The solutions allow you to input and track your products using catch weight and unit.
Catch weight management ERP significantly increases efficiency and reduces human error, providing you with a competitive advantage in the industry. However, it would be best if you understood that ERP integration also affects other processes in your firm, like order guides and rebates. You may need to consider these functions in your integration for optimum results.
Before integrating the ERP into your catch weight function, it would be wise to consider all the functionalities needed. Step back, observe your processes from a broader perspective, and start the integration.
Why GoldFinch?
GoldFinch is among the few ERPs dedicated to maximizing efficiency in the complex processes involved in the food industry. The platform has powerful features to ensure constant inventory control, cost management, and profitability improvement.
One of the main reasons why many prefer GoldFinch for catch weight management is it offers easy calculation for each case. Other reasons why you should consider GoldFinch include:
- Maintains inventory by catch weight unit and inventory unit
- Uses catch weight unit to set up sales and purchases
- Uses inventory unit to create purchases but receives by catch weight unit
- Uses inventory unit to enter sales orders but picks by catch weight unit
- Prints packing list and picking tickets with inventory and catch weight unit
- Ensures the entered catch weight values are within a reasonable range of values by defining catch weight tolerance percentages for products
If you want a practical ERP optimized for catch weight management, GoldFinch ERP is your best bet. Want to learn more? Contact us today.
