To ensure success in the food and beverage industry, you must maintain compliance. If you don’t adhere to regulations, there will be consequences that could result in financial loss and operational shutdowns. To avoid these consequences, you need to pay attention to the stipulations of the regulations that govern the processing and distribution of food and beverages. Pairing Salesforce with GoldFinch ERP can help food and beverage manufacturers manage their compliance.
When it comes to dictating consumer protection guidelines affecting food and beverage manufacturing in the USA, two federal entities are involved: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The FDA has a few mandates directly affecting food and beverage manufacturing, including the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the Bioterrorism Act of 2002, and the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). Of course, these are just a few of the protocols that are in place and must be followed for a manufacturer to be compliant.
Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) system that can be paired with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to help ensure manufacturers follow complex food and beverage regulations. Goldfinch ERP offers users a detailed overview of their company’s operations and allows them to automate tasks related to compliance to speed up the processes of the supply chain. It also allows the company to make informed decisions regarding follow-through with various regulator protocols.
Below, we explore how you can expand Salesforce with GoldFinch ERP to manage food and beverage compliance.
5 Ways to Manage Food & Beverage Compliance with Salesforce
It is important to remember that Salesforce is a CRM; therefore, it manages customer-facing tasks. It is used to identify and reach out to customers affected by compliance issues. GoldFinch ERP is used to find compliance issues and manage the back office.
Below are five things that Salesforce, when combined with ERP, can do for food and beverage companies to handle compliance:
- Quality control
- Planning/scheduling
- Inventory traceability
- Material tracking
- Collaboration
Quality Control
When it comes to food and beverage manufacturing, there are strict health requirements that both manufacturers and distributors must comply with. If a company is not in compliance, it could mean the company will face the consequences from the regulatory agencies and consumers.
For example, most foods and non-alcoholic beverages have a limited shelf life. If a product is past the age of safe human consumption and finds its way to market, customers’ well-being could be impacted. Not only that, but it could also affect the company’s reputation.
Along with Goldfinch ERP, Salesforce offers quality control and assurance programs that inspect and cross-check products against specific required attributes. If something is out of the ordinary, it can be flagged and examined to determine viability. Salesforce and Goldfinch ERP will automatically quarantine items that are non-compliant to avoid accidentally distributing them.
Planning/Scheduling
Production and transportation of foods and beverages have a much stricter timeline than other products to preserve product quality, putting more pressure on the supply chain processes. If deadlines are missed, it could mean a significant loss of investment, but it could also increase risk in case of an audit. If items are out of place at the wrong time, it could affect compliance.
Planning and scheduling with GoldFinch ERP offer a streamlined method of managing your production and shipping. You can automate timetables based on priority to fit within your company’s requirements. It is easier to identify conflicts between processes, avoiding potential contamination of batches with incorrect ingredients.
Inventory Traceability
While it’s true that the requirements that food and beverage companies must follow are long, non-compliance is not an option. Therefore, to reduce the risk of not fulfilling these requirements, the information regarding each package must be monitored and carefully analyzed.
Manual analysis takes a lot of time and increases the chance of human error, but not analyzing can significantly impact the company if non-compliant items leave the facility.
Goldfinch ERP offers a lot of traceability functionality, allowing companies to maintain accurate, up-to-date inventory reporting. This allows tracking of packages in case of contamination, issuing quicker recalls of these and other products. Real-time manufacturing info streamlines compliance monitoring at all levels of distribution.
Material Tracking
In addition to inventory tracking, material tracking is vital for ensuring companies maintain compliance with regulations. In addition to preserving the freshness of food and liquid ingredients, this is also important to prevent accidentally putting specific components in the wrong products. For example, potential allergens pose a danger to consumers if packages are not appropriately labeled. If foods and beverages are found without warning on the box, it is considered non-compliant.
GoldFinch ERP offers recipe and material tracking, which enables precise monitoring of all components throughout the whole supply chain. Detailed reporting allows the discovery of incorrect/substandard ingredients on the back end and addresses trends focused on transparency. Audit trails allow verification of “farm to fork” ingredients and farming partnerships for labeling.
Collaboration
Finally, when you combine Salesforce and Goldfinch ERP, you are facilitating successful communication between all business units and other entities involved in the supply chain. If this collaboration were not possible, a company risks human error leading to non-compliance at any point in the supply chain. In addition, supervisors/executive leadership can look into vital processes to find situations where there may be a breach of compliance.
Conclusion
In addition to the above perks for managing compliance, when GoldFinch identifies compliance issues, Salesforce notifies consumers that a problem has come up and which lot numbers are involved in a recall. In addition, combining Salesforce with GoldFinch allows you to respond to a compliance issue quickly.
As you can see, Salesforce and GoldFinch ERP are critical for ensuring that food and beverage manufacturers remain compliant with FDA and EPA regulations. If regulations are not complied with, it could cause a loss in profits and even a shutdown. However, with Salesforce and GoldFinch ERP in place, you don’t have to worry—you can automate compliance to focus on other things. Consider adding GoldFinch ERP to your Salesforce CRM today.
