Food and Beverage.
Coolearth Software understands the many challenges facing food and beverage manufacturers today and has developed solutions to help them by:
- Reducing Inventory Carrying Costs
- Providing Accurate Information for Better Decisions
- Reducing Operating Expenses to Increase Profitability
- Meeting Customer Demands for Responsiveness while Cutting Costs
Reducing Inventory Carrying Costs
Food and Beverage manufacturers waste millions of dollars each year in unnecessary inventory carrying costs. These costs arise from excessive standing inventory, underutilized or inefficient use of warehouse space, ineffective product recalls, and spoilage.
Solutions from Coolearth help Food and Beverage manufacturers stay competitive by enabling them to reduce both the quantity of standing inventory and the carrying costs it incurs.
To minimize standing inventories, Food and Beverage manufacturers must reduce safety stocks and increase the velocity of goods through the facility. To reduce carrying costs, inventory must be proactively managed to ensure that it is being stored, consumed and shipped in an optimal manner. Whistle software from Coolearth can help by providing:
- Automated Data Collection – Whistle leverages barcoding and other automated data collection technologies for accurate, real-time data. By minimizing inventory uncertainty, Whistle enables companies to reduce safety stocks without compromising their ability to meet order demand.
- Automated Transactions and Optimized Space Utilization – By automating key transactions and optimizing space usage, Whistle reduces the material handling and data entry costs associated with order fulfillment, effectively enabling companies to increase the velocity of goods through the facility without increasing costs.
- Spoiling and Aging Alerts – Whistle proactively alerts key personnel to aging or expiring inventory so that it can be targeted for quick movement to avoid spoilage costs.
- Directed Picking – By enforcing First In First Out (FIFO)/First Expired First Out (FEFO) picking, Whistle ensures that products will be picked before they expire.
- Tight-banded Recall – Whistle’s real-time data collection and tracking provide extremely detailed and accurate visibility into inventory, allowing product quality issues to be quickly identified and narrowed to the source of the problem. The problem inventory can then be pinpointed to the small quantity of offending product and automatically located and quarantined.
Providing Accurate Information for Better Decisions
Successful Food and Beverage manufacturers make real-time decisions to best meet their customer demands while balancing the cost of service. Cooleath’s solution enables accurate real-time production and inventory information by providing:
- Real-time Facility – Coolearth’s solution features Whistle software that captures production and inventory transactions as they occur, using barcode technology for speed and accuracy.
- Wireless Inventory Stewardship – Warehousing and production personnel are empowered to guard the accuracy of information by providing the real-world status to the information system to ensure that business-level decisions can be made on up-to-date information.
- Executive Dashboard – Coolearth’s Whistle Dashboard provides a user-configurable, web-based view into all inventory and production data.Personnel from the headquarters to the shop floor gain the ability to view order status, track inventory movements, and view critical metrics such as production yields, warehouse utilization, order fulfillment accuracy, and more. User-configurable alerts allow employees to focus on adding value, confident that Whistle will notify them when of problems such as shortages and pending product expiration in time to correct them.
Reducing Operating Expenses to Increase Profitability
Food and Beverage manufacturers are facing diminishing margins and increasing competition from large conglomerates. To sustain a competitive advantage in the process marketplace, manufacturers are turning to Coolearth to provide Supply Chain Execution automation technology to cut costs.
Solutions from Cooleath enable production facilities to eliminate manual, redundant, and paper based tasks by providing:
- Wireless Transaction Processing – Using Whistle software warehouse and production personnel can process transactions directly from the point of action with wireless industrial computer systems. Shipping, receiving, and production processes become streamlined with ‘online’ instruction and confirmation.
- Real Time Intelligence – Management personnel have real-time visibility into the day-to-day operations of their production facilities. Less time is spent aggregating data from different IT systems in the hybrid production facility; latency between shop floor action and visibility is completely eliminated.
- Seamless Integration with Existing IT Systems – Whistle™ tightly integrates with disparate IT systems such as process control, enterprise resource planning, and order management to keep the hybrid production facility coordinated. Using a solution from Coolearth information about production processes, raw materials, and finished inventory are aligned in one system to minimize complexity.
Meeting Customer Demands for Responsiveness while Cutting Costs
Success in current market conditions is achieved by meeting customer demands for shipments every time, no matter how often they change. To stay competitive, Food and Beverage manufacturers face the dual challenge of increasing customer service levels and cutting costs.
Solutions from Coolearth provide Food and Beverage manufacturers with advanced techniques to meet the increasing demands and reduced lead-times of their customers without building expensive inventory reserves or increasing warehouse expense by providing:
- Real-time Order Dispatching – Warehouse and production personnel are dispatched to work on the highest priority orders through real-time integration with the ERP or order management system.
- Directed Picking and Putaway – By optimizing the utilization of warehouse space, Coolearth’s directed picking and putaway boost the efficiency of material handlers, enable higher velocity of products through the plant, and enforce rules such as FIFO/FEFO, as well as customer-specific requirements such as shelf life.
- Catch-weighting – For many products, each box must be individually weighed and tracked so that customers are invoiced for the exact weight they receive. By automating the data collection and transactions involved, Coolearth solutions significantly minimize the costs associated with managing catch-weighted products.
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