FDBusiness.com

Over the past 30 years, Sysco has worked with many food and beverage companies in Ireland and understands the needs of the various niche sectors, whether meat, dairy, drinks, feed, seed, processing or distribution. The Sysco team has worked across all sectors and understands the cost and compliance pressures, and that in many instances, there are multiple business types or companies within a group.

Sysco was established in 1980 and employs 50 people in Dublin and Belfast, providing business software solutions to organisations throughout Ireland. Clients range from large scale distributors to discrete manufacturers, from government bodies to service-orientated companies. Sysco’s continuous lifecycle management of its clients from the system consultation stage, through to the final implementation and on-going support, builds strong relationships and commitments to serving client’s evolving needs.

Food and beverage manufacturers produce a wide range of products, and the market is volatile. Consumer demands change rapidly, and new health and specialty niches are making the market more complex. Some demands are long-term – such as continual demand for lower prices, stricter safety requirements, and more detailed labeling. Others are short-term – such as demand for current popular flavors or new packaging or ingredients.

Primary Business Challenges

Innovation success is more of a differentiator than ever before, because customers are less loyal to brands and both consumers and direct customers are more focused on their specific needs.

While brand loyalty may be down, the number of consumers looking for products from sustainability leaders is up. The good news is that many sustainability practices can also lower costs.

Market responsiveness is crucial to ensuring that the right products are available in each outlet of each channel at all times to capture the consumer’s business.

According to a white paper from industry analysts Cambashi Limited, new and profitable opportunities are emerging for food and beverage manufacturers who are ready to commit to innovation, sustainability, and faster market response. In the white paper ‘Innovative, Sustainable, and Responsive: Food and Beverage Manufacturers Evolve for the New Economy’, Julie Fraser speaks of some of the changes food and beverage companies must make to succeed in today’s environment.

Here are a few points about that evolution.

• Food and beverage manufacturers can no longer succeed by fine-tuning a relatively straightforward process of pushing as much through the production and supply chain operations as efficiently as possible. They must be flexible to handle a much more complex product line and set of sales channels that appeal to specific niche buyers and their lifestyles.
• To enable employees to succeed in this more complex environment, IT can ease the burden. Comprehensive and industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) and surrounding IT infrastructure tools are not only important, but necessary and increasingly available to even smaller companies.
• Most food and beverage manufacturers currently have significant gaps in data flows that result in waste and errors. These can lead to ineffective innovation, inadequate traceability of product sources and handling issues, and slow responsiveness to market shifts.

Food and beverage companies that evolve to a business process utilising more integrated ERP tools together with mobility, business intelligence, and collaboration tools can improve business performance and seize opportunities to gain market share.

Sysco’s experience assists you through the primary business challenges and can lead you on to new and profitable opportunities. Sysco’s integrated applications and interfaces for the food and beverage industries, some examples of which are interfaces to Innova, Producer payments, Van Sales Hand-held Interfaces, third party logistics, Mobile Sales System, Route Management, Replenishment Planning with seasonal variation, Product Costing/Margin, Multiple Stock Valuation, mean that you analyse the data you want, when you want, and then you can transform this raw data into decision driving intelligence. Sysco speaks your language and speaks your customer’s language.

Sysco’s experience and insight has helped the following Irish companies forge ahead to greener pastures – Avondale Foods, Foyle Food Group, Gleeson Group, Connacht Gold, Ampersand, Odenberg Engineering, Germinal Holdings, Dawn Farm Foods, Dale Farm – saving money and improving productivity with their choice of ERP/Manufacturing software.

For further information visit www.the-food-people.com.