Introduction

All companies need to make a profit, but maintaining profitable momentum in today’s roller coaster economic environment can be a challenging task. Making money in the fast moving fresh food industry is particularly difficult and the challenges of managing large volumes of low cost items, with limited shelf life, moving at high speed through the supply chain can be daunting. Whilst management recognise that focussing on short term financial stability can be counter-productive in the long run, sanctioning capital investment to improve productivity when resources are stretched can be a difficult call. For food companies, this dilemma places significant demands on their resources and key challenges include:

  • Rising global raw material costs
  • Pressures from the large supermarkets and retailers to reduce prices.
  • Increased legislation and red tape
  • Increasing staff costs
  • Potential fines and brand damage resulting from EPWs and RTMs

‘Let’s get by now and look at this again next quarter’ is an all too often comment in the board room. For many years, the IT industry has struggled and in many cases failed to help the food industry find effective solutions to these issues. Unfortunately isolated IT solutions are typically overly complicated and expensive to implement, failing to gain buy in from management and factory floor operatives. In parallel they usually fall short of effectively integrating the factory floor and office environments.

However every company can start to deliver improved profits without significant pain by addressing five very important questions…

The five questions that companies should ask are…

  1. How can I reduce the waste my plant generates?
  2. How can I ensure that I manufacture my products consistently – right first time?
  3. How can I accurately measure and reduce my over fill /over pack?
  4. How can I be sure that my finished goods are correctly labelled?
  5. How can I get visibility and control of my unaccountable losses?

Marco have written a Technical Guide which provides answers to these critical questions, giving insight into how to implement procedural changes that can improve profitability by as much as 10%. This free Guide is available by emailing info@marco.co.uk.