Production planning in the food industry

– Easier data entry and compilation of production volumes.

The challenges for the food manufacturers

Food manufacturers work under a number of conditions that place special demands on the production planning.

Apart from often handling many different product types and therefore many production lines, the companies must also take into consideration parameters such as shelf life and allergens as well as ensure continuous quality control in the daily production.

Furthermore, they have to consider –to the extend it is possible – factors such as fluctuating demand and failed delivery of raw material.

The demand is controlled by several factors, making it difficult to determine the optimal production capacity. This can result in periods with excess capacity and other periods where the capacity is too low.

It might also be difficult to get the right raw material on time. At worst, the production manager might have to purchase raw material from a more expensive supplier, which eats into the profits.

How, then, do you ensure to a greater extent that you can deliver what the market wants and optimise production accordingly?

Efficient data entry of production volumes with InfoSuite

The optimal production volume is determined by campaign plans, actual and expected orders, last year’s production, seasonal variations and much more.

This also means that several employees often contribute with input to the production planning.

With InfoSuite Budget, you and your colleagues can easily type in production volumes based on all wanted input and create the optimal production plan week by week.

In InfoSuite, you can integrate suggested volumes based on orders, expected sales, production figures from last year and much more. Based on the suggested volumes, it is easy to make the final, small adjustments to the production volume before starting up production.

Immediately after typing in the volumes, the data is stored at a central location where employees from the production can access the optimised production volumes.

During the data entry itself, support functions such as calculator, remaining budget and distribution plans are practical tools for lightening the work and creating an efficient production planning process.

Production planning week by week at Haribo

At HARIBO, they use InfoSuite for production planning.

“When we started looking into how we could develop a system for production planning, InfoSuite Budget turned out to have the functions, we needed” Anders Bloch, IT manager at Haribo, explains.

The challenge was to develop an interface in which it is easy to enter data and which week by week can create an overview of what to produce and when to produce on the different production lines as well as for which campaigns and markets.

”InfoSuite Budget was adapted to the production’s weekly planning. We have just implemented the solution and have 100 users all over the Nordic countries and we can already clearly see the benefits. It is important that the right employees see the right data and this is where InfoSuite provides security. We used to pull out data for the individual reports whereas today they are available for the necessary employees all over the organisation. This means that we can use the capacity in the production much better.”

”We have less operators for more processes and they have to concentrate on quality control. For this reason, it is extremely important that InfoSuite is user-friendly as it saves valuable time when the necessary data is readily available.”