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Food and Beverage
Industry Challenges Addressed
The ROSS suite of solutions from Ross
Systems, and our specialized consulting services, are designed to
address the unique challenges you face in the food and beverage
industries. These include:
Food Safety
The present-day threats and potential costs associated with food
safety have never been higher. As companies seek to increase their
control and in turn, minimize the risks, they discover that many
varied activities, both within an outside the organization, must
be considered. Operations up and down the supply chain must all
be addressed.
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ROSS provides a comprehensive
inter-enterprise solution that helps you monitor, track
and control your critical internal and external activities.
Capabilities in the areas of end-to-end traceability,
specification management and change management provide
the control and predictability needed to detect and
address exceptions early in your process. When potential
issues are identified, you can quickly determine the
underlying cause and make the necessary corrections.
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Regulatory Compliance
As concerns for food safety continue to rise it s not surprising
that industry regulations and enforcement, in areas such as HACCP,
are becoming more stringent. Increasing regulations are also causing
the overhead cost of compliance to increase for many companies.
How do you minimize the risks of compliance while keeping your operational
costs down to maximize profits and enable growth?
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ROSS is designed to help
you efficiently address your compliance objectives and
is fully implemented in many HACCP-certified environments.
From regulatory planning, to execution and documentation
of results, ROSS automates many critical functions.
All standard processes are documented and all operations
and results are tracked and logged to support your detailed
reporting requirements. In the end, ROSS streamlines,
and reduces the cost of, your compliance efforts by
providing the visibility and control you need.
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Brand Protection
Many companies are investing significant money and effort to build
awareness for their brands in the market. This strategy can pay-off
handsomely in competitive, commodity markets. One highly publicized
recall however, can turn an established brand asset into a liability.
Nervous consumers can cause distributors and brokers to quickly
abandon your products in the channel.
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Reducing your liabilities and protecting
your brand requires that you address three objectives:
- Reduce potential causes of a recall,
- Minimize the scope of a recall should it occur, and
- Manage the recall to a rapid conclusion.
ROSS provides the capabilities
needed to address all three. Quality control and specification
matching help you immediately identify and act on variations
from specs. Bi-directional lot tracing helps you quickly
link every step in the supply chain for every ingredient
and determine the current location of ingredients, products,
co-products and by-products. The lot tracing also enables
you rapidly facilitate the recall process should it
be necessary, and thoroughly document the final disposition
of all recalled products.
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Consistent Product Quality
Variability is the enemy. For most food and beverage manufacturers,
variability in the attributes, shelf-life and potency of raw materials,
intermediate products and finished-goods inventory, creates significant
challenges for your process specifications. These dynamics can add
delays and costs into your process and impact customer satisfaction
if the quality for your products is not maintained within strict
tolerances.
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ROSS is designed with quality
(QC) and quality assurance (QA) as integral parts of
the process. QC and QA are critical path steps enabling
quality to be planned and managed like any other process.
With unique dynamic recipe adjustment capabilities,
ROSS helps you minimize the effects of variability
throughout your manufacturing process and supply chain.
Shelf-life planning capabilities enable optimized production
and inventory usage to reduce the expiration of materials
and finished goods and maximize the shelf-life of shipped
products. Additionally, attribute tracking allows you
to monitor unlimited product attributes uniquely for
each batch or lot, and proactively ensure that delivered
products will meet individual customer expectations.
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Right First Time
Most food and beverage manufacturers operate on relatively thin
margins. With the added overhead of regulatory compliance, the need
to minimize rework becomes critical. For most companies, small percentages
of rework translate into significant cuts into profits. Executing
right the first time is paramount to survival and growth.
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ROSS provides the advanced
planning and tracking capabilities needed to ensure
that errors are avoided. Yield planning and analysis
capabilities allow you to establish standard benchmarks
and identify out-of-tolerance conditions. When thresholds
are exceeded, you receive early notifications so that
problems can be corrected quickly while the impact can
be minimized.
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Product Line Profitability
Can you accurately identify your most profitable product lines?
This is often critical for companies seeking to focus on their most
valuable products and consider dropping their unprofitable products.
To do so requires visibility into all material and production costs,
including indirect costs or value resulting from co-products and
by-products. Visibility is also needed into actual profits that
account for promotional deductions such as rebates, discounts and
adjustments to orders and payment terms.
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ROSS provides the end-to-end
visibility needed across purchasing, inventory management,
manufacturing and sales to support your comprehensive
cost and profit analysis. Support for actual costing
exposes all material and operational costs. With Co-Product
and By-Product tracking, you can account for all down-stream
costs and link benefits back to primary products. You
can also link all costs from trade promotions and channel
incentives back to finished goods to accurately determine
the actual profit on each product sold.
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Pricing and Promotions
In the complex sales channels of food and beverage, small adjustments
to pricing and promotional incentives, such as ad-hoc deals, can
have significant impacts on sales volumes and revenues. Raising
your prices can increase profits per unit, but also drive demand
to a competitor. Similarly, offering larger rebates can motivate
brokers and distributors but cut into already-thin profit margins.
Sophisticated systems are needed to fine-tune your pricing and promotions
to achieve the ideal balance and ensure that company objectives
are achieved.
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ROSS includes the comprehensive
capabilities needs to support a broad range of requirements
in price management, promotional spending, deal discounting
and rebates. The solution address your needs whether
you are dealing with large companies using volumes to
negotiate better pricing or smaller companies that have
banded together to increase their leverage through cooperatives.
You can adjust pricing, promotional spending and discounting
limits, and monitor results based on many factors including
product line, customer, territory, sales manager, salesperson,
distributor and broker to optimize the value realized
from each sale.
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Optimized Planning and Inventory Levels
Sales forecasting and ultimately the estimation of demand in the
food and beverage industries is highly dynamic, effected by price
changes, promotions, seasonality and many external factors. Effective
demand planning is necessary to optimize manufacturing and distribution
asset utilization, reduce the cost of finished goods inventory,
and promote high customer service levels by minimizing stock-outs.
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With ROSS, you can account
for the impact of events and market conditions, and
understand demand patterns to accurately forecast demand
down to lowest levels. ROSS includes powerful
applications that integrate best-fit forecasts based
on historical demand, with user-anticipated differences.
The system continually improves each forecast, learning
from the most recent period of demand, measuring forecast
error, and highlighting exceptions. As a result, you
can optimize your operations while minimizing the cost
of inventories and ensuring customer service levels.
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Customer Satisfaction and Demands from Channel
Masters
As global markets become more competitive, your customers continue
to consolidate into larger companies and buyer leverage and service-level
expectations continue to rise. The manufacturers that will thrive
and grow in the food and beverage industries will increase their
value and differentiate through tighter relationships and with exemplary
service for their customers.
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ROSS helps you address all
the demands of your customers in a variety of areas
including product quality, sales commitments and product
availability, make-to-order, vendor managed inventory,
on-time delivery and customer service. With integrated
capabilities in all of these areas, you can ensure that
each customer receives the unique tailored services
they value most while you maintain proactive 360?visibility
to all activities that impact their experience. Ultimately,
ROSS can help you differentiate your company
from the competition and increase your value to your
customers.
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