Sometimes just a simple change can bring a lot of value to the software ROI discussion. We recently accomplished this with a product addition here at SimplyFood.
A good number of food companies utilize copackers to manufacture their products. In a lot of cases, the copacker provides some of the raw materials used to make the product, and the contracting food company provides some raw materials or maybe the packaging components.
So it is typical in most systems that the contracting food company places a purchase order for the finished good with the copacker at a contracted price, but they still own some of the inventory. So when that purchase order arrives, the contracting food company needs to relieve the inventory that they own and add that cost to the final finished product. In a lot of systems, this requires the company to start a work order or kit assembly, as a separate process, to account for those raw materials that they own. This can often be a tedious process requiring multiple steps to complete, and users hate these types of processes.
So let’s say you are a company that sells hot cocoa dry mix in a plastic pouch. Your copacker partner owns all of the dry ingredients you use to make your hot cocoa mix. Your company, however, owns the pouch that is used to package the cocoa mix, and your company also owns the measuring scoop placed inside of the pouch. These two items are stocked at the copacker location.
The process of combining these items into a final product can be a bit clunky in some software systems because you have to account for the finished good item in a purchase order to the copacker, but you also have to account for the same item in a work order to relieve your stock of the two packaging sites and roll up costs.
In SimplyFood software, we have streamlined the process of creating and automating a ‘kit’ with some very simple customizations to standard Acumatica functionality to do the following:
- Place a purchase order in the SimplyFood system for the actual finished good product the contracting company sells, which is sent to the copacker.
- The copacker makes the item and then either holds the manufactured items in their warehouse or ships them to the contracting company. Either way, the contracting company enters a purchase order receipt for the finished good item quantity. This puts the finished good item into stock.
- At this point, the SimplyFood software allows a user to generate a kit assembly transaction directly from the purchase order receipt screen. The quantity on the receipt is grabbed for use by the kit assembly and the pouches and scoops used during production are consumed and costed into the finished good item.
VIEW SCREENSHOT BELOW
SimplyFood ERP reduces the amount of clicking in software to complete, what should be, simple tasks related to inventory management. By streamlining processes such as these, food companies can focus more on selling and shipping food to e-commerce customers, Amazon, or retail partners.
This is what we do at SimplyFood. We take the great platform Acumatica has given us and make it work better for food-focused companies.
