Part 2: Navigating High Inflation and Interest Rates in the Food & Beverage Industry

Inflation and interest rates are casting a significant shadow over the food and beverage industry, profoundly impacting various aspects of operations. Prices for ingredients, packaging, energy, transportation, and labor have surged, translating into higher consumer prices. As a result, consumers are shifting towards lower-priced alternatives, posing challenges for manufacturers. Those equipped with robust insights and cost agility are weathering the storm better, while others grapple with shrinking margins.

Amidst this economic turbulence, regulators have responded by significantly increasing interest rates to curb inflation. However, this move has further strained smaller businesses and startups, grappling with the high cost of capital. Consequently, the industry landscape is witnessing a scenario where larger enterprises dominate, consuming smaller players struggling to stay afloat.

Part 1: The Adoption of Technology in Food & Beverage

In today's rapidly evolving food and beverage industry, adopting technology is not just a choice but a necessity for businesses aiming to stay competitive and efficient. From AI and machine learning to enterprise automation and IoT, technological advancements are reshaping how companies operate, engage with customers, and manage their supply chains.

The Role of Technology in Business Transformation

Leading food & beverage sector businesses embrace a digital-first approach to drive growth and streamline operations. This includes leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), generative AI, enterprise automation, IoT (Internet of Things), and Industry 4.0 solutions to enhance productivity, optimize processes, and deliver superior customer experiences.

Partner Spotlight: Info's OS Technology Platform

Our partner, Infor, with its innovative OS technology platform, is at the forefront of this technological revolution. Info has been instrumental in helping food & beverage businesses harness the power of cutting-edge technologies to unlock new opportunities and overcome operational challenges.

How Info is Empowering Businesses

Infor's OS technology platform offers tailored solutions designed to meet the specific needs of food and beverage companies. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Info enables businesses to analyze vast amounts of data in real time, gaining actionable insights to optimize production, predict demand, and enhance supply chain efficiency.

By streamlining and enhancing product quality assurance processes and refining recipe management capabilities, this solution simplifies and centralizes the intricate operations inherent in process manufacturing, ensuring consistent excellence in product quality, compliance, and efficiency across the production lifecycle.

Philadelphia, PA – February 19, 2024 -- Independent Computer Consulting Group, Inc. (“ICCG”) is pleased to announce the addition of Infor PLM for Process (Optiva), a best-in-class PLM solution from Infor to help process manufacturers up their game for new product introductions adhere to required regulatory compliance and maintain highest standards of quality and safety for their consumer-grade products. This best-of-breed PLM solution enables new products to be developed quickly, using the best possible formula, all while maintaining full compliance with all regulatory requirements.

Maximizing the value of R&D

Infor PLM for Process (Optiva®) is specifically designed for food, beverage, chemicals, and life science manufacturers and provides a unified product view of data and processes across organizations. It helps manufacturers easily achieve regulatory and labeling compliance—whether it’s meeting reporting requirements, complying with labeling laws, or supplying ingredient details.

Infor Optiva PLM streamlines processes for product development, material selection, formulation, and new product introductions. The solution is helping process manufacturers worldwide:

• Deliver fast innovation. Companies using Infor PLM for Process can reduce the time to develop new products 50% or more by simplifying development processes, improving supply chain collaboration, and integrating product lifecycle management with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other core processes.
• Optimize formulas. Infor PLM for Process delivers industry-leading capability for analyzing material cost, inventory, and manufacturing capacity to help process companies select the best formula for a given product. By optimizing product formulas, process companies can significantly reduce material costs and manufacture more efficiently.
• Ensure 100% labeling compliance. Complying with label content requirements is critical to overall success for process companies. Infor PLM for Process provides the capabilities food and beverage, home and personal care, pharmaceutical, and nutraceutical companies need to design and produce labels that consistently meet government regulations.
  
  

By Christine Dominski, ICCG Senior Business Consultant

Do you find yourself searching for Information through multiple Excel files? How about Teams or SharePoint sites? Do you struggle with managing approvals or reviews?

Maybe it is time for a Product Life Cycle Management System (PLM).

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the process by which Research and Development innovate new products and manage quality throughout the product lifecycle to ensure the highest level of consumer satisfaction and shareholder value.

PLM systems wrap around Business Strategies and Product Portfolios to help coordinate information and collaboration across an organization. The process of generating product ideas, all the way to product retirement, can be managed in a PLM system. Manage Suppliers, Items (ingredients), Formulas (recipes), Label and Project information, all in one place. Record approvals at every step of the way to provide audit trails.

Product Lifecycle Management affords the peace of mind that all data is managed and reported as required by your organization. A PLM system allows you to control User access to the information as needed for your business success. Integration with ERP systems and a data lake are available. Use the data lake to feed E-Commerce initiates or other internal systems used for reporting.

By Christine Dominski, ICCG Senior Business Consultant

Have you ever wondered if a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system is right for your business? Is the Business Value unclear? No matter the size of your business, a Product Lifecycle Management system can provide insights and discipline to a Company's process. Let’s provide clarity on the business value.

Standardize Business Processes – By understanding what makes your business tick, you can standardize the processes in a system to maximize efficiency. Once you maximize efficiency, you can realize a quicker time to market with new approval processes tailored to your needs.

In today’s highly technical, data-driven fashion environment, the limited functionality of spreadsheets and other outdated, manual-entry tools often result in significant time lags, data inaccuracies, linear sequential processes, and an inability to integrate with shared data libraries. When the greatest asset a fashion manufacturers can have is getting new ideas to consumers quickly, manufacturers can’t afford to let technology slow them down.

That’s why fashion companies need Infor CloudSuite™ PLM for Fashion—a modern, product lifecycle
management (PLM) solution that can handle the fast-paced demands of a 21st-century fashion business. It can help brands develop new styles with increased speed, greater flexibility, and more consistent quality.

Based in the cloud, CloudSuite PLM for Fashion lets you work from anywhere, on virtually any device.Innovate faster. Infor CloudSuite PLM for Fashion is a powerful PLM and collaboration platform that can help fashion manufacturers and their value chain partners innovate faster, make processes more efficient, and easily share information. As a result, fashion manufacturers will have the tools they need to create exciting fashions and deliver them to consumers faster.

The fashion business has unique demands, and one of the most critical is the need for a collaborative design and development process. This process must be able to function in an environment of complex global sourcing, whether a company is in high fashion, luxury goods, apparel, footwear, home textiles, accessories, or any other style-based products. What makes this unique—and quite complicated—for fashion companies, is the sheer number of varieties that typically exist within product lines, such as styles, colors, and sizes. This complexity compounds further when additional lines and collections enter the mix.

In this  blog post, we’ll explore the first step in reinforcing a collaborative network which is to establish a strong product lifecycle management process that helps manage collections, sustainable fabric compositions, and design specifications. 

In today’s highly competitive and consumer-driven marketplace, fashion companies are under enormous pressure to create exciting new products at a moment’s notice. By providing a central repository for storing and accessing design and development information, CloudSuite PLM for Fashion can help businesses meet this need for speed, while also making sure new styles and collections are delivered with consistent quality—at the right time and right price.

Accelerate innovation with CloudSuite PLM for Fashion

Whether a company has 20 users or more than 2,000, Infor CloudSuite PLM for Fashion is designed to accelerate development cycles to get ideas to market faster. With its intuitive, personalized user interface, CloudSuite PLM for Fashion is an end-to-end solution that connects every aspect of a product’s lifecycle, from the first sketch to the store.

We thought this was an interesting article. Published by Forbes this month it talks about how it’s a virtual certainty that this year will end with physical stores sales not only being up year over year (again) but also, according to eMarketer, contributing more incremental sales growth than e-commerce.

Great news but for all retailers? Here's what Mitchell Chi, ICCG's General Manager - Americas, Enterprise Software has to say...

My thoughts about the collapse of the middle…

Did you know that 83% of retail shoppers enjoy socializing with friends centered on physical stores? Some retailers, when pressured to increase margins, focused on cutting wages, training and staff. They shifted spending to store displays, traditional advertising, and  a poor product assortment. These retailers deserved to die. Good riddance. 

But all of this makes the mid-market ripe for a low cost, “social retailer.” One like Primark. Great selection, well trained staff and FUN. My go to store for weekend, lay around the house clothing. 

Independent Computer Consulting Group Extends Relationship From India And US To Europe, Targets New Verticals

Infor, a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry, today announced that Independent Computer Consulting Group (ICCG) has become a Gold Channel Partner in Europe.  This builds on the existing, extensive relationship between Infor and ICCG, who is already a global delivery and Alliance partner.