The manufacturing industry has witnessed extraordinary changes over the past 250 years, with enterprises more recently transitioning to the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Industry 4.0 addresses the challenges of the modern world with autonomous systems, smart technology, machine learning, and an agile operations model.

This transition to automation has inspired sweeping changes in asset management and maintenance as well. Manufacturers looking to gain a competitive edge and create a more resilient infrastructure have begun adopting the doctrine of Industry 4.0 in tandem with upgrades of their maintenance efforts that embrace the human side of technology and empower employees to reach new levels of productivity.

A strategic approach to Asset Performance Management (APM) helps you keep critical equipment and production lines up and running, using the mountains of operational data now available to help you track equipment performance, anticipate the need for maintenance, and prevent breakdowns before they occur. But even in steady economic times, and certainly in the midst of a global pandemic, the decision to embrace the new technology will always be guided by the bottom line: Will the cost of the new system be justified by the efficiencies and cost savings it delivers?

Amid the current global trends surrounding climate change, waste reduction, economic growth, and political transparency, a growing awareness has emerged worldwide around sustainable practices in both the private and public sectors. For food and beverage industry enterprises, sustainability can be affected at nearly every stage of the supply chain—from sourcing and processing to distribution and retail. Each of these distinct supply chain functions can activate sustainable initiatives within their own area, and they’re all deeply interconnected. A change in any one area of the food and beverage supply chain has a sustainability impact on the other areas. When you use cloud solutions to create change, it makes it easier for stakeholders in each arena of food and beverage to break down any communication silos and work together to shift the ways food is produced and distributed.

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.

Food and beverage companies face another pivotal year as the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing businesses to reevaluate their supply chain and operations strategy. To combat the challenges of supply chain disruption, shifting consumer demand, and market uncertainty, many organizations have turned to technology to promote resiliency and galvanize their business processes for the year ahead.

Below are five technology trends that experts anticipate will gain popularity in the years ahead as manufacturers prioritize agility and resilience over reactivity.

Adaptability and quick turnarounds on strategy had never been more vital during a challenging decade for the restaurants and food services industry so far. The good news for many is that so many organizations rose to that challenge, with restaurant technology playing a singular role in helping them to continue to meet demand and to serve guests via multiple channels, specifically using advanced restaurant point of sale and integrations with mobile ordering.

As much as the industry landscape has been defined by challenges and disruption, it’s also allowed decision makers to consider how present conditions help to anticipate what the rest of the decade might look like. This has meant looking at the basics, the essentials for successful restaurants to best consider and the continuing role restaurant technology will play. Over the last few weeks, we’ve published several posts that explore these factors. Here’s a summary to consider.

Throughout the pandemic, food and beverage companies have weathered surges in demand, rapid fluctuations in consumer buying habits, and the complexities of the global supply chain. Without complete enterprise-wide visibility or collaboration, shifting gears and adapting to trends in the market can seem insurmountable.

How can you modernize to keep pace with the speed of consumer needs in today’s competitive market? We recently did a webinar with Mark Winter, CFO of My Food Bag, to hear how his company, a leading online meal kit provider in New Zealand, managed to improve business productivity, efficiently manage the growth of its business and navigate the pressures of the pandemic.

Here are some valuable takeaways from the webinar. Watch the on-demand recording if you want to hear more about how My Food Bag deals with special requests from customers for particular food products, or ingredients, how the company manages last-mile delivery, and what they do to get the right balance between supply chain efficiency and sustainability.

Stability is important. Hotels, casinos, and resorts have guests they need to serve right now, today. Hospitality software solutions in place help them do that by taking care of the basics: reservations, check-ins, folios and check-outs, along with a staggering variety of in-house services and their associated charges. Essential software like hotel PMS is pretty “sticky” that way; it’s easier to stick to what you’ve got than it is to change. Why fix what isn’t broken?

Here’s the thing. Five years from now – perhaps sooner – the way guests engage with hospitality providers will likely look very different. Innovative solutions and platforms will be necessary to scale to that new paradigm, whatever it may be. So how do hospitality organizations know when it’s time to start planning for that? How do decision-makers know when it’s time to get unstuck? Here are 3 considerations to help answer that question.

As new hospitality technology emerges and as organizations increasingly invest in it, the ways people do their jobs change in response. Most of the time, this means greater efficiency, and a way for teams to concentrate on key tasks while the technology takes care of the necessary minutiae. Some of the time though, the rise of certain technologies can cause some concerns that with certain functionality in place, the human factor will get lost.

Hospitality AI functionality in hotel revenue management and in hotel pricing tools is a case in point. The conversation around automation via algorithms has been too easily positioned with a “versus” between machine learning solutions and professional expertise. Yet, the features of the technology and years of knowledge and experience held by revenue and strategy teams isn’t adversarial. The relationship between them is more about achieving greater focus and clarity. How do science-based algorithms in revenue management and pricing solutions help your organization do that? Let’s look at some key points.

When every transaction counts more so than ever before in restaurants and food services, forward-thinking strategies around restaurant menu management have become more important than ever before. Central to that is how much leading organizations have risen to the occasion to streamline the way they manage they their offering and push the newest versions of menus to the point of sale, unified across locations and concepts.

Restaurants and managed food services rely on current data and the technology needed to find useful narratives about how to enhance performance and maximize returns, specifically at the menu item level. How does that work? What role does restaurant POS play in that process? Let’s take a look.