Industry Summary Articles

The food and beverage (F&B) industry is dealing with accelerating changes, meaning more disruptions and opportunities, and more information to process. These pressures are pushing a shift in F&B’s preferred approach to gathering and handling information — a shift away from transaction management, often in the form of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and into innovation and end-to-end brand management via Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

Food and beverage companies have tried countless ways to improve and monetize the innovation process. PLM solutions have a proven-in-use track record for delivering higher value in brand management and new product introduction.

The most dramatic impact is the new level of connectivity achievable — with greater transparency — throughout F&B’s enormous amount of data. Many food and beverage companies are at risk of being buried in the data spawned by the exponential growth of new products. The number of retailers’ SKUs keeps climbing. A typical grocery store has 20,000 to 50,000 SKUs, though not all are F&B related. The biggest stores have far more and no two grocery stores stock the same things. As a peek into the data sprawl of F&B and for all retailers, just one eye opener: Coca-Cola has 500 brands and 3,500 products in its global portfolio.1

Meanwhile, driven by intense competition, F&B business models and strategies are undergoing fundamental change in regard to regulators, retailers and customers. For decades, F&B’s approach to managing information was to focus on transactions, specifically the costs of everything sourced, produced and sold.

Development of new products usually had to fend for itself even as F&B data and information expand exponentially. Burdened with inadequate tools and poorly integrated, ad-hoc processes, product developers resort to work-arounds. Work-arounds solve immediate problems but they add complexity and process variation, and do little to resolve underlying shortcomings…

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