48% of food and beverage manufacturers noted that ensuring compliance with current and future regulations is their top pressure.
Legal standards
As, mandates such as the Food Safety Modernization Act and GS1 standards are constantly evolving and changing, it makes difficult for businesses to enforce compliance and avoid fines.
Competition on FMCG markets
At the same time, food and beverage manufacturers, food services and retailers are wary of the demands of their customers. Increased competition makes quality and safety competitive differentiators, but at the same time the risk of damaged reputation due to noncompliance and recalls is substantial. Therefore, food and beverage manufacturers have additional pressure beyond regulatory compliance to do all they can to proactively manage compliance and provide visibility internally and externally.
From Field to Fork
There are many critical areas where food and beverage manufacturers need traceability. Organizations need to be able to follow a product through every critical node.
These include:
- Suppliers; Lascom provides a collaboration tool to better manage suppliers relationship.
- Raw materials; Lascom quality module eases traceability and raw material information gathering.
- Certificates of Analysis; The platform offers documentation and certifications such as CoA automatic attachments to products, enabling effective information searches, updates with impact analysis and distribution to customers.
- HACCP; Lascom assits F&B businesses to ensure compliance with sanitary standards and compliance requirements of the legislation, including with regard to food safety standards, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and the system Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP).
- Audits; Lascom tools are useful to analyze problems concerning traceability/audits through stage gates.
- Customer claims; Lascom solution provides a CCM assistant to help businesses with customers’ complaints and non conformances.
A better visibility in Food and Beverage
Leaders emphasize strategies to improve visibility too. This includes the ability to view and trace product data across the product lifecycle for decision-makers. It also includes improving documentation, making it easier for the organization to interpret, compose, and share that information with key stakeholders, including regulators. Proper documentation is also essential for compliance and can be useful for competitive differentiation when used in marketing campaigns.
But it’s not just about providing visibility into information related to ongoing operations. The benefit if having a technology foundation that supports a single source of truth is that best practice standards, recipes, and requirements can be communicated and enforced.
Leaders are 61% more likely to have a centralized repository of this information. Of course, the standardization of procedures and products is a perfect opportunity to be proactive in managing compliance. Lascom offers a unique repository, to benefit from a “single version of the truth”. All data and documents such as certification are stored on the platform. Searches and audit, whether as part of an operating procedure or in emergency situations such as product recalls and health alerts, are considerably easier.
By implementing a PLM solution, top performing food and beverage manufacturers, food service and retailers can proactively manage compliance, while keeping costs low and delivering high-quality, consistent products.
