Industries - Food and Beverage - Our Approach

Admiral Consulting Group is a leading provider of professional services and software solutions for the Food and Beverage Industry. Our strength and the reason we feel we can make a difference in your business lies in our extensive industry knowledge and solution offerings for this rapidly changing market.

In partnership with Schouw Informatisering, Admiral Consulting Group exclusively offers SI Foodware®. Combined with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, this forms a standard company-wide ERP solution for the food and beverage sector.

By combining our many years of industry experience and the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP solution in conjunction with SI Foodware we can help you succeed in achieving your goals for continued business success.

Our partnership with your company is based on integrating critical business competencies, defining and implementing internal business processes, making innovative use of technology and understanding the human component inherent in each engagement. Finally, we carefully manage expectations by communicating early and often; and if in doubt, communicating more.

To learn more about Admiral Consulting Group and our solutions please do not hesitate to contact us.

The food and beverage industry faces many challenges — ensuring food safety, keeping up with regulatory and compliance mandates, managing constantly shifting customer demands, and squeezing margins from complex distribution networks. The key to success in tackling these challenges is information — capturing data up and down the supply chain and providing access for analysis so that executives can make rapid, informed decisions. For most companies and supply chains of scale (i.e., mid-market or larger), this type of sophisticated information management requires a common, integrated information technology platform.

Few industries confront the complex distribution challenges that face food and beverage companies. Coordinating the safe and profitable delivery of tomorrow's meals across a supply chain that includes far-flung farms, factories, and stores is a difficult, high-risk activity that invites regulatory scrutiny and disastrous publicity when distribution processes and supply chains fail (contaminated products, product recalls — or worse). Distribution and supply-chain management in this industry are tougher than ever due to rapidly changing markets and customer demands (such as new food trends, promotion-driven purchasing, shifting consumer preferences), supply fluctuations (such as logistics delays, crop failures, product embargoes), and evolving food-safety standards and regulations.

All these external events, trends and activities represent vast amounts of data that should inform decision-making — if the information is available in real time, so that the right goods of high quality move to the right destinations (processors, packaging plants, warehouses, restaurants, customers). Just as importantly, this external information must be viewed within a context of internal data from sales departments, warehouses, processing facilities, etc. This can't be done with spreadsheets alone; making information available and actionable within a variety of companies, locations, and software applications requires the advanced functionality of an integrated, easy-to-use IT platform.

Benefits of an Integrated Platform

To safely and cost-effectively speed products from ranchers and growers to store shelves and restaurants, food and beverage companies need tools that help them remove waste, ensure safety and regulatory compliance, and connect demand signals to production and logistics schedules. And as these food and beverage firms grow into midmarket and larger organizations, an integrated ERP solution becomes a necessity, supporting the following benefits.

Operations and Logistics Effectiveness

Opportunities to increase food-distribution productivity can be found all along the chain that brings products to market, but improving overall performance (and not just the individual performances of specific locations such as warehouses or production lines) requires a big-picture perspective. Most logistics best practices (delivery-route planning, coordinating cross-docking efforts, logistics-optimization techniques such as truck-space optimization, catch weight accuracy, minimizing transfer perishability) demand detailed shipment tracking and management capabilities accessed by multiple companies and applications. In addition, automated data collection systems connect buy-and-sell data and ensure that financial actions (invoice, payment) occur in a timely and accurate manner.

Compliance

It's not sufficient for a food and beverage company to prove its products are safe, high-quality, or compliant with regulatory and labeling requirements (e.g., organic, sustainability). companies must also ensure that their supplier's products (and their supplier's suppliers' products) adhere to these criteria well. An integrated solution can help a food and beverage company to automate product tracing, tracking products and providing details that partners (packagers, manufacturers/producers, retailers) in food-industry supply chains expect.

Market Agility

Emerging food categories force food and beverage companies and their supply chains to move quickly. Trends such as organic foods or private-labeling can require reconfigurations of supplier sourcing, ingredients, branding, logistics and marketing messages. An integrated solution helps to align messaging with these trends, coordinating marketing campaigns with changing market dynamics. In addition, detailed business reports help food and beverage companies analyze the distribution channels available to them (grocer, restaurant, institutional, etc.) on an ongoing basis, offering a deeper understanding of the delivery and value-add.

Customer Demand Management

The best distribution system to bring products from suppliers to market is meaningless if those products aren't what customers want now. And not just what they want, but how they want it (quantity, package, serving size, level of processing).

Integrated solutions enable accurate demand forecasting (preparing a food and beverage company's supply chain for anticipated demand) and help growers and processors to meet actual customer consumption (scheduling processing and delivery more precisely).

Does your food and beverage company use these distribution and supply-chain strategies to manage quality, compliance and profitability? Does your company have an integrated information platform sophisticated and flexible enough to meet today's challenges and leverage tomorrow's opportunities? If not, it's time to reassess your supply-chain strategies, processes, and supporting business systems and then implement an action plan to improve your company's ability to get goods to market safely and on time by turning product data into a competitive advantage.