Quality is among the most crucial considerations in any manufacturing process. Your company must maintain concentration consistency to guarantee high-quality products. Delivering quality products will also improve brand reputation and gain a competitive advantage.
A practical approach to enhancing your manufacturing processes and ensuring high-quality products is implementing a manufacturing ERP. Enterprise resource planning platforms like GoldFinch provide quality control functions for improved formula and recipe management.
Read on to learn the importance of consistent concentrate formulas and how an ERP can help.
ERP for Formula Management
Formulas play a significant role in process manufacturing, which means managing them is vital in product development. Unfortunately, many manufacturers may not know how to best store and access their formulas. For example, you may find them stored in Microsoft Excel files instead of an advanced management platform.
It would be best to consider implementing an ERP to help you with all your formula and recipe management needs. The ideal ERP will keep your formulas updated and secure, resulting in improved productivity. It helps achieve better compliance scores, consistency, and product scalability while enhancing the efficiency of recipes.
Formula management includes several activities, including formula optimization. The ERP function selected should facilitate creating and managing workflows, formula variants, content labeling, and inventory planning. It also helps automate formulas, ensuring consistency across batches by eliminating manual calculations of ingredients and concentrates.
How Does ERP Help Avoid Batch Failure
Companies using Excel sheets to manage their formulas are more susceptible to batch failure. It would be wise to consider a manufacturing ERP to help with formula management. It records, stores, compares, changes, and scales your processing formulas while controlling access.
Here is how an ERP will help achieve consistent formula management:
Formula Creation and Correction
Your ERP solution will help create and manage different formulas and recipes for your products. It also implements various testing techniques, and developers can change the formula to create better versions.
ERPs like GoldFinch can automatically adjust concentrate percentages according to the defined parameters; if the formula requires active ingredient X to be at 10% but is at 20% in the manufacturing process. It adjusts the formula to create a resulting concentrate level of 10% to ensure the formula remains consistent. The same applies to water and moisture percentages in products.
Fosters Innovation
Another advantage of implementing manufacturing ERP is it allows formula editing without impacting the master formula used in production. It unlocks innovation through facilitating what-if calculations to achieve targeted chemicals, nutritional, and cost values. You can also compare multiple formulas to identify the most profitable one.
Formula Scalability
The diversity in process manufacturing requires you to have a flexible formula management system. The demand for a product can rise and fall depending on several factors, and manufacturers must be prepared.
Your business should be ready to produce varying quantities without tampering with the formula or active ingredient’s concentration. The ERP allows you to run multiple formula simulations and observe the outcomes. It also ensures your process keeps the perfect proportions to avoid compromising the final product’s quality.
Supports Multiple Packaging Options
Most goods produced in batches, like cooking oil and cough syrup, are available in varying packages. The packages have varying weights and volumes, making it slightly challenging to keep track. You can run and manage formulas of different products simultaneously effortlessly by adopting an ideal ERP.
Since ERP software is formula-based, manufacturers can add ingredients in the defined proportions in terms of volume or weight. Instead of manually adjusting the formula in every packaging, let an ERP system help you automate the process.
Supports Multiple Units of Measures
It is reasonable to expect the materials used in product manufacturing to have varying units of measure. Some raw materials are measured in KGs, while other active ingredients are in concentrate percentages.
ERP makes it easy to make calculations using multiple UoM. It supports unit-to-unit conversion of the materials involved and solves all mathematical queries. You can use the calculations to scale different proportions in the formulas while preserving product composition.
Product Costing
Involving ERP in your formula consistency strategy also makes it easy to track and manage the costs involved. The software can help calculate direct material, overheads, and direct labor costs to determine how much you need to manufacture one unit.
You also achieve optimum costing for all batches produced from the multiple-simulation feature. It’ll run down the different scenarios and compare the total manufacturing cost per unit. The ERP also helps to separate product packaging from manufacturing costs.
By-Product and Co-Product Management
It would help if you considered including an ERP in your formula management system to help store, manage, and cost by and co-products. The system will outline these elements and advise on the best disposal approach.
The product developers will need to define the by- and co-products in the manufacturing process and record them in the system. There are many ways to turn these products into profits for your organization. You can add them to the total production process yield or sell them separately.
Compliance
There are quality standards for manufacturers to follow in every industry. Some industries have strict regulatory requirements because of their nature, such as healthcare. These compliance requirements also help in achieving industry-wide quality control.
Modern ERP solutions come in handy when it comes to compliance. The solutions focus on meeting industry benchmarks in the production process instead of leaving it as an afterthought. Some of the standard regulatory bodies include HACCP, FDA, and GHS. Also, the audit trails in your ERP will facilitate record-keeping for the creation, modifications, and deletions of the formulas.
How GoldFinch Helps Maintain Concentrate Consistency with ERP
Formula and recipe management are all about consistency, and GoldFinch makes it easy to achieve. Most food and beverage processors understand the significance of controlling their formulas to maintain quality, consistency, and reliability.
GoldFinch is a perfect ERP to help manage your formula concentrate and the varying amounts of water in your processes. You’ll need to configure these parameters first, and the system will automatically know which ratios to shift.
The perfect time to implement an ERP in your business is now. You’ll find handling different recipes and production processes a lot more manageable. Let’s get started!
