Striving for Operational Excellence is nothing new to both leaders and followers in the food industry. Still, given the industry’s unique characteristics, finding a way to accomplish it can be a difficult feat for a company.

Any food industry enterprise often finds itself at the mercy of global commodity markets. Once you account for other difficulties such as high demand variability and low margins, it becomes clear why achieving Operational Excellence is a challenge. However, there are ways to ensure both quality and Operational Excellence in the food industry. Here are the things you should keep in mind:

Optimizing Your Manufacturing Process

You can’t achieve Operational Excellence without having a firm hold on your manufacturing process, and that starts with controlling your data. The only way to optimize the process is through data collection and analysis — the more automated this process is, the better. To this end, do away with paper-based systems and digitize them instead. You’ll feel the positive impact of this change throughout your entire organization. There are plenty of benefits to enjoy, from making it easier to demonstrate compliance with quality standards, to being able to trace your metrics a lot more reliably.

Keeping Up with Compliance Standards

With digitizing your enterprise comes the ability to track your implementation of compliance standards. It is important because it gives you some useful insights into how you can improve the quality of your products. It’s always better to address compliance standards early on, instead of running afoul of them and having to correct course. It keeps customers happy and prevents possible financial consequences.

Becoming Able to Save the Day

In case of an unwanted event related to non-conformance to compliance standards, you need to be able to react quickly. Especially in the food industry, any product can become the victim of a quality issue. It leads to costly recalls and damaged brand reputation. To prevent this, you need to be able to catch compliance issues before they become a huge problem. With automated workflows that can manage compliance issues before they escalate, you can avoid the brunt of the blow.

Learning How You Affect the Environment

Another thing that could become a problem is the sustainability costs. If you wish to have a clear picture of how much your operations cost, you can’t forget to include sustainability costs when measuring your KPI. Once you have the data, you can analyze it to see if it’s possible to improve the efficiency of your manufacturing process by reducing some of the costs. Use sustainability information along with your general production data to truly understand its impact.

Implementing Enterprise Systems

The right tools can be of immense help in your quest to achieve Operational Excellence. Use them to create a lasting foundation for conducting all your processes and improving collaboration while breaking down the silos in your organization. Enterprise systems like ERP and QMS can integrate and synchronize all the systems and methods in your organization to create a single, strong value chain.

Here at Intellect, we have an out of the box eQMS solution that can help you do it. Let go of outdated processes and achieve Operational Excellence by driving success with collected data and automation.