From bakeries to zucchini farmers, food and beverage companies are eager to pursue avenues of growth. Many endeavor to jump start these opportunities by embracing modernization and adopting digital strategies. New technologies offer exciting ways to leverage data, engage with customers, and automate processes. As a result, new and innovative ways of looking at products and the supply chain develop, transforming how we do business. While the potential impact of digital transformation is promising, it can also be intimidating. Where do you start? How do you measure success?

To answer these and other critical questions, use this checklist to help guide your successful digital deployment.

1. Define a Clear Mission

Your digital action plan must start with the key mission you hope to achieve. This should be related to the very core of why your organization exists. What experiences and products do you want to offer? You must be crystal clear on this point. Although product and service offerings are often blended today, you need to be able to clearly define your goal. If you can’t articulate your mission, chances are your personnel, partners, and customers will be confused and unreceptive.

2. Invest in Innovative Thinkers

Balancing the workforce between doers and thinkers is important. Every company in the food and beverage industry has a mix of hands-on workers and managers who focus on bottom-line profitability. But you also need the creative problem solvers who can bring imagination and a vision for the future. “If an organization has many scientists, technologists, engineers, or mathematicians, it should add artists, ethnographers, anthropologists, design thinking experts, and story tellers,” says Wang. Different perspectives can spark creative thoughts and fresh approaches to solving business problems. Encourage these individuals from divergent disciplines to form teams and learn from each other.

3. Focus on Business Models First

Conceptualize your business model first, then decide how to execute it. Keep in mind you can have more than one business model and multiple revenue streams. Start from a core objective and then work out what technologies, people, and systems you need to support the model. Multiple layers of partner networks, ingredient suppliers, processors, and packagers may be involved, as well the need to manage seasonal variables. Map these out early and in detail, as these contributors will likely impact the cost of doing business and margins.

Asset performance is key for food and beverage processors to reliably produce safe food at the lowest cost. This goes beyond only having the equipment available. Asset performance is one of three variables used to calculate the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)—the other two variables are availability and quality. In food and beverage processing, quality is primarily about food safety, which is non-negotiable. Studies show that a food safety issue leading to a recall in average costs $10 million. The associated brand damage can be unmeasurable.

The state of equipment and the behaviour of workers have a big impact on food safety. Eliminating food safety risks and risks to workers are the primary responsibilities of any food processing company. Numerous food safety issues caused by contaminations with extraneous material like metal coming from broken filling equipment, or grease or detergent remnants are reported to the FDA and RASFF every year. Cross contamination, pathogens, and faulty labeling are other possible reasons why food and beverage manufacturers must recall products

Even when your warehouse operations seem to be running smoothly, there is always room for improvement and a need to stay up to date with innovation. While steps are taken to keep warehouse operations at peak performance, when fulfilment times and levels are jeopardized, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back on track are taken correctly so that product can make its way out the door, and time is always working against you.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of moving your warehouse management system (WMS) to the cloud, it’s time to reevaluate. Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different with new challenges emerging over the past several months. By empowering critical systems like a WMS with cloud capabilities, your organization can scale quickly, maximize productivity, and minimize outages and downtime to prevent bringing the company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.

Know you want to transform but don't know where to start? Want to gain $9-12 for every dollar you spend? Read on to find out why starting with your people is the best first step to prioritizing digital transformation projects.

Digital transformation is at the top of the to-do lists of most companies, but one topic that is often missing from a discussion on digital transformation is which areas to prioritize. Most businesses can’t afford to completely overhaul a core function of the enterprise top to bottom, along with the technology that supports it, at any one time. Instead, they’ll target specific areas for transformation. That approach minimizes disruption to the business, keeps costs manageable, and helps the business apply lessons learned to future transformation projects. The question, though, is which areas to target first?

The food and beverage industry is ripe with complexities, and the journey from idea to commercialization is long and arduous for food technologists. New product ideas or packaging developments have to endure rigorous data collection, testing, and certifications to make it to consumer shelves—processes carried out by food technologists working with manual tools, creating a wide margin for potential error.

Excel and pen-and-paper methods are common ways to record data and make calculations regarding research and development, quality standards, raw supplies orders, and dozens of other variables associated with the manufacturing process. Luckily, the industry has seen an uptick in the adoption of digital transformation methodologies. Accessible, commodity-based technologies are making it easier to accurately record data and make mission-critical calculations.

1. Are we organizationally ready for significant change?

Organizations are only as good as their people, and manufacturers must look carefully at whether they have the right people and culture to support a different way of doing things. It is the people who will be responsible for implementing change, and they should be ready, committed, and on board with any type of transformation plan.

An organization’s culture can make or break a digital transformation project and “organizational change management” is one of the key components of such a project. Organizations should aim for an inclusive culture where people feel like they are key contributors to the company’s future success.

To achieve this, management teams should encourage a culture of openness to help employees step forward with their ideas. All change, and all transformation, starts with an idea – so it’s important for people to feel empowered to put their ideas out in the open.

Many companies face two dilemmas with respect to technology strategy—succession planning for retiring Baby Boom-generation CIOs, and keeping up with the digital transformation of their industry. In the past, those two issues were unrelated. But now, outdated technology platforms and legacy software solutions artificially constrain companies in both respects, making it difficult to respond to technological disruption, and limiting the choice of future CIOs to those capable of managing obsolete technology.

Digital technology is changing the world, one industry at a time. With these changes comes a reimagining of the supply chain, from the systems businesses use to communicate and interact, to the strategies they deploy to move goods around the world. Along the way, our expectations for speed, service, and quality go up, forever altered.

Digitalization gives rise to new business models, in which real-time connectivity, greater visibility, reactivity, and anticipation become the underlying characteristics of our supply chains. But this kind of change isn’t easy, and transformation doesn’t happen overnight. While many businesses have adopted technology to augment or enhance existing processes, they’ve still got a long journey ahead.

By taking a staged approach to digital transformation, and building greater connectivity across the supply chain, businesses can pave the way toward a fully-connected future, while still being able to tackle the biggest challenges they face right now.