Ten things you’ll love about Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations.
For the food processing and distribution industry.
Process manufacturing (used to make food products) is quite different from discrete manufacturing. In the most basic terms, process manufacturing creates stuff, and discrete produces ‘things’.
Process uses multiple recipes and variable ingredients which are blended and transformed into something new. Think honey, sugar, nuts, dried fruit, oats and coconut oil mixed together then baked to make a completely different product – a muesli bar. Each ingredient in the bar has a use-by-date, and its point of origin and batch must be traceable and accounted for. As must the final ready-to-eat bar.
Discrete takes standard parts and components and assembles them into widgets (well ok, that widget could be a million-dollar forklift). It’s an amalgam of components often with serial numbers fabricated into one larger ready-to-use product. The nature of the smaller parts isn’t changed by the manufacturing process.
So, we’ve established that food manufacturers make value-added products that will degenerate over time. But that’s far from the only challenge facing the industry.
They’re under pressure to meet the demands of:
To achieve sustainable growth, food processing businesses must balance natural, financial and market forces. Easier said than done!
Customers need to be engaged to open up new markets and generate a loyal following. Employees need to stand out from the rest – like any business, service is a huge differentiator between success and failure. Operations need to be optimised to enable a rapid and agile response to market demand. And of course, insights analysed to recognise the potential of new products or ways of refreshing existing product lines.
Out of all the solutions I’ve seen and worked with over the years, D365 F&O impresses me the most. And it impresses the food processing customers who’ve chosen it.
Why? Well, the list is long, so I’m not going to dive too deep, but here goes:
Try this:
Mix well. Enjoy.
By John Showell
Fusion5 Sales Executive – Microsoft Dynamics