Why the Food and Beverage Industry Is Increasingly Using NetSuite
The food and beverage business can be as complex as the ingredients food and drink creators use to please their customers' palates. Managing how food and equipment is purchased and sourced, as well as the complicated financial mechanisms necessary to get goods to people and businesses, involve a lot of moving parts.
That's where NetSuite comes in. As the #1 cloud ERP on the market, you can consolidate the components of your business using one unified solution, so you can simplify operations and discover more efficient ways to generate profits.
NetSuite for Food and Beverage: 6 Ways to Harness the Power of NetSuite
This blog post will examine how the food and beverage industry is using NetSuite to:
- Consolidate financials
- Reduce costs by leveraging data
- Deal with seasonal peaks
- Prevent incorrect deliveries
- Better manage and integrate assets
- Improve food quality
1. Financials Consolidation
Restaurants, suppliers, growers, and everyone involved in the supply chain can use NetSuite to bring their financial systems under a single umbrella, making them easier to manage and automate while increasing visibility. Because there are so many facets to the delivery of products and services in this industry, inefficiencies due to disparate systems can easily crop up, and NetSuite can help prevent them from happening.
For example, a restaurant that has to source some of its ingredients from local farmers and others from national distribution chains can bring all payment, fulfillment, ordering, and inventory systems into a single instance of NetSuite. In this way, they can discover less expensive ways of sourcing high-quality ingredients and even adjust recipes to reduce the costs of their dishes.
2. Reducing Costs Through Smart Data Use
NetSuite makes it possible to collect and use the mountains of data generated by food and beverage businesses to uncover better ways of serving customers and boosting profits. Every transaction generates useful data, and with NetSuite, these can be analyzed and the results used to fine-tune marketing and bring down the cost of goods sold (COGS).
For instance, an alcoholic beverage producer can use NetSuite to reveal the costs involved in sourcing the base spirit, such as vodka made from grains, flavoring agents, bottles, and the shipping expenses associated with each. Examining this data in NetSuite can surface the best ways to make vendor and shipping supplier changes to reduce costs.
3. More Efficient Ways to Deal with Seasonal Peaks
Seasonal peaks typically come with higher demand, and it can be easy to overspend on everything from sourcing to marketing to foster and meet this demand. With NetSuite, you can use historical data to ascertain the impact of previous peak seasons and then leverage this to design your strategy for upcoming peak periods.
In this way, NetSuite gives the food and beverage industry the ability to plan ahead. As a result, adjustments can be made in an organized, strategic fashion.
4. Preventing Incorrect Deliveries
When businesses use NetSuite to manage delivery and fulfillment, the chances of incorrect deliveries can be kept to an absolute minimum. For example, because inventory, orders, and warehouse logistics data can be consolidated in NetSuite, details about the shipment of ingredients to satellite locations of a chain restaurant are all in one place, including:
- Where each ingredient is coming from
- Its final destination
- The areas of the warehouse it passes through during the fulfillment process
- When and how it gets sent to shippers
- When it arrives
5. Improving How Assets Are Integrated and Managed
Aside from inventory, NetSuite can also make it easier for food and beverage industry professionals to manage equipment, tools, trucks, refrigeration facilities, and more. Each asset comes with acquisition and management costs. With NetSuite, industry professionals are able to see these expenses through a single pane of glass, analyze the numbers, and discover ways of cutting expenses—all without sacrificing the quality of the end product or service.
For example, a supply warehouse that stores and ships canned goods to restaurant chains may have to manage a fleet of trucks and forklifts, as well as conveyor belts and other machinery to get products in and out of their doors. The costs of maintaining each of these assets can be tracked and balanced within NetSuite, providing them with a far more detailed COGS than would otherwise be possible.
6. Food Quality Improvement
In the food and beverage industry, supply chain dynamics, the vendor landscape, and seasonal conditions constantly change, which means there are many ways to improve food and drink quality. With NetSuite, companies can do this without unnecessarily increasing costs. For instance, a food manufacturer may have been using an inorganic supplier of a key ingredient for years. The numbers have worked thus far, but the company is considering adjusting ingredients to meet the needs of the healthy food sector.
With NetSuite, the overall cost of getting these ingredients can be easily analyzed, and decision-makers can make adjustments that make it possible to source the same ingredient from an organic supplier that’s physically closer or that has access to a less expensive shipping solution, making the costs of the organic ingredients comparable—or even less expensive—than that of the inorganic ones.
How GSI’s NetSuite Experts Can Help
GSI's NetSuite services for the food and beverage industry can help you implement a full instance of NetSuite. During this process, GSI’s experts analyze the needs of your business and custom-design how you will leverage NetSuite to realize savings and boost profits. Learn more by connecting with GSI today.