Bakery businesses are a delectable cornerstone of the culinary world, crafting various tempting treats that tantalize taste buds and evoke a sense of comfort and joy. From the comforting aroma of freshly baked bread to the exquisite artistry of intricately designed cakes, bakeries offer a delightful escape into a world of flavors and textures.
These establishments, often rooted in tradition and family recipes, cater to our sweet cravings and provide a hub for communities to gather and celebrate special occasions. With a rich history dating back centuries, the modern bakery has evolved into a dynamic industry, blending tradition with innovation to satisfy the ever-growing demand for quality baked goods.
As purveyors of indulgence and creators of culinary wonders, bakery businesses play a crucial role in shaping the culinary landscape and weaving the fabric of our daily lives. Let’s look at the bakery industry’s challenges and how to overcome them.
Shelf-Life Management Challenge
When customers bite into a loaf of bread and find it stale, it can devastate your bakery’s reputation; this industry is very competitive. You must ensure that only the freshest and most delicious items leave your facilities and end up in clients’ hands and supermarket shelves.
If your recipes call for perishable food material and your goods are only viable for so long once they’ve been properly baked and packaged. keeping track of expiration dates can be cumbersome. Using a simple spreadsheet or recording everything by hand is impractical when you’re busy trying to keep up with orders on the factory floor.
Managing Your Expiration Dates
Expiration date tracking and management are critical features of bakery-specific ERP systems. A fully digital system is needed to manage the sheer volume of data and functionalities that enforce a first-expiry, first-out (FEFO) picking order for ingredients and finished products.
The Acumatica Expiration Management module makes it easy to set expiration windows and receive alerts when items are approaching expiration dates. It helps you maintain customer satisfaction while reducing waste from spoiled food products.
Minimize Allergens
Food safety and allergen labelling are top priorities for consumers. Suppose you’re in an industry that produces or sells food. In that case, you may need to comply with allergen-labelling requirements to maintain a safe for customers who are allergen to food.
When baking goods such as bread, cookies and cakes, allergy control should be a significant concern for your business. Industry-specific software can help you overcome this challenge by providing allergen reporting and allergen-specific recipes.
Ingredient Segregation and Proper Labeling
Keeping ingredients with allergens in a separate area is essential to ensure food safety. The same goes for products manufactured in a space where cross-contamination is possible; they should be labelled accordingly.
With the Product Specifications module of Acumatica Food & Beverage ERP, you can easily manage your ingredients and capture allergen information. You’ll also have access to traceability so that we can quickly track any food contaminations to their source and identify affected items.
Supply Chain Disruptions
Bakery companies across the spectrum of sub-industries are shouldering the challenge of keeping up with the demand for fresh products in a splintered, sprawling supply chain.
At the same time, food and beverage companies of all types have had to get used to the unexpected when managing their complex supply chains. Though some disruptions will happen no matter what you do, you can minimize the impact on your business by proactively planning for supply chain disruptions.
Enhanced Planning and Distribution (EPD)
To help you maintain the right balance between supply and demand, we have developed the Production Planning module for Acumatica Food and Beverage ERP. This module allows you to identify which items need to be produced by seeing sales orders and current inventory side by side. Intuitive filtering lets you easily see which items require production activities, and alerts can be deployed if the balance is upset.
Production Scenarios offers you the flexibility to create different plans executed according to the situations at hand and lets you set which will be the primary and which will serve as backups. Our Vendor Item Catalogue modules make re-ordering easy, and our faster order entry functionalities save your valuable time and resources so you can reallocate them elsewhere.
consumer preferences
A key trend in the bakery vertical is the proliferation of new product varieties. Low-carb, gluten-free, fortified and indulgent offerings are popping up constantly, while personalized items are becoming more popular. To stay relevant as a brand and capture your share of the audience that these items appeal to, you need to iterate on ideas and launch new offerings quickly.
Though that’s only a given for some companies, especially those focusing on efficiency and the bottom line in delicate economic circumstances. Those bakeries that rely on their most popular bars and don’t try to keep up with changing tastes could hamper their future profitability more than they know.
New Product Development Made Easier
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a solution to get new baked goods out the door and into the marketplace. These are the “single source of truth” that all the teams involved in new product development—from research and quality control to marketing—need to have for a streamlined and successful process.
Conclusion
An efficient system plays a pivotal role in streamlining operations. Tailored for the unique needs of bakeries, Acumatica ERP software seamlessly integrates various business processes, from inventory management to order processing.
This enables bakeries to optimize production schedules, ensuring timely delivery of fresh products. With real-time insights into sales trends and ingredient availability, bakery owners can make informed decisions, minimize waste. And enhance overall productivity. In essence, an ERP solution empowers bakeries to achieve operational excellence and deliver delightful treats to customers with precision and speed.
Sangeetha brings 20 years of experience in Information Technology which includes Solution architecting, building micro services, research, and evaluation of business applications, integrating apps.