<p>Four pathways where F&B functional leaders can make an impact include: <b>Unified Food Safety & Quality Solution, HACCP at Enterprise Scale, Supplier Food Safety & Quality Management, Sustainability and ESG</b><br> </p>
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PATHWAY 1
Moving towards predictive Food Safety & Quality through a unified approach and integrated solution providing assurance and control.
The task of managing Food Safety & Quality (FSQ) is becoming more complicated. Between supply chain disruption, increased rate of innovation in the industry, and the need to maintain knowledge bases within the company, food and beverage organizations need ever-increasing agility. An increased reliance on suppliers and external manufacturers has made maintaining a culture of food safety more challenging while expanding product portfolios puts further strain on limited FSQ resources.
Companies lack a unified view of all their data in the context of business operations and a structured process for communicating and sharing data with suppliers and external partners. Current systems are often fragmented, disjointed, not connected, and unable to capture both food safety and quality events in the same system. With an inability to capture patterns in the data scattered across these various systems, F&B organizations are unable to move from a reactive to a proactive management of their Food Safety & Quality.
PATHWAY IN ACTION: GLOBAL MARKET LEADER IN NUTRITION
A global market leader in nutrition, operating with production facilities across many geographic regions, is taking action to interconnect its sources of information to stay ahead of supply chain shocks, ensure commodity supply stability, and deliver safe and quality products to consumers. To achieve these goals, the company needed to digitize its data and make it available and actionable in a centralized tool that enables quick and safe decision-making.
VEEVA’S APPROACH
Veeva's cloud-based unified solution is a platform that can support the entire variety of this company's food safety and quality processes. By adopting Veeva's solution, the company plans to establish a modern technology infrastructure that prioritizes quality, safety, agility, and speed. Beyond food safety and quality, this initiative is part of a larger digital transformation effort that can improve collaboration and business outcomes throughout the organization, fostering seamless communication and coordination among teams.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PATHWAY 2
Effectively manage the deployment of HACCP and food safety knowledge of complex product portfolios across manufacturing locations.HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control points) is a systematic, preventive approach to food safety, controlling biological, chemical, physical, and allergen hazards that can cause the product to be unsafe by designing measures to control these hazards at safe levels.
F&B enterprises with complex product portfolios and large numbers of manufacturing facilities are challenged to manage the deployment of HACCP efficiently and effectively across a variety of products and geographies. Effective sharing of knowledge from central experts to the factory floor is essential to ensuring that control measures are deployed consistently to safeguard consumers.
In many F&B companies, HACCP studies are derived from disjointed database systems providing hazard information and maintained in spreadsheets and documents, often relying on human action to keep all systems in sync and up to date. In today's increasingly disruptive business environment, your organization will struggle to sufficiently solve this using non-scalable solutions and often unstructured data.
PATHWAY IN ACTION: TOP-FIVE GLOBAL F&B COMPANY
A top-five global food and beverage company with a portfolio of over 1,000 brands has been managing HACCP plans manually in spreadsheets. This painstaking process not only consumed valuable time but also posed a significant risk of error. With the mounting complexity involved in creating and maintaining a quickly expanding number of HACCP studies, the company recognized the need for a platform that transparently standardizes the creation, management, and sharing of HACCP studies across various divisions of the company, including creating master HACCP plans at the R&D level that can then be modified and localized. This company approached Veeva to co-develop a solution to meet their growing needs.
Veeva’s HACCP management capabilities–part of a cloud-based, unified food safety and quality application–seamlessly digitizes and automates HACCP study management, mitigating the risk of critical errors and omissions, and identifies food safety threats that need to be mitigated. As part of a larger digital transformation initiative, this solution will help deliver increased efficiency and improved business outcomes across the company.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PATHWAY 3
Streamline communication and ensure compliance across your entire supply chain.
The supply base in the F&B industry is extremely fragmented, diverse, and involves the complex interaction of thousands of participants. F&B organizations rely on their suppliers to manage their food safety by ensuring that the materials they’re supplying are safe and their food safety processes are effectively managed.
Most organizations use standard digital tools such as email, spreadsheets, and shared drives to organize and communicate requirements to their supply networks, making response times slow when speed is needed most. Supplier audits or assessments by F&B organizations typically reside in a separate system or approach, making it difficult to manage the supplier authorization process without substantial manual rework.
Veeva's cloud-based Food Safety & Quality (FSQ) solution allows F&B enterprises to invite external partners like suppliers and co-manufacturers onto the platform to securely exchange information and collaborate.
The solution allows for the exchange of documents, such as specifications and Food Safety & Quality requirements; collaboration on supplier NCRs, CAPA, and root cause analysis; conducting audits; and FSMA supplier verification. Workflows and timely alerts inform users of recurring tasks and document expirations, preventing blind spots. Audit trails ensure that all workflow participants know what’s been completed, saving precious time. The result: completely streamlined supplier FSQ management in a single end-to-end solution.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PATHWAY 4
Sustainability and ESG
Build confidence in today’s dynamic and uncertain regulatory world.
Consumers increasingly demand that companies be vocal and transparent about what they do to address sustainability and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) concerns and how their products are being developed and sourced. While regulations are spotty, the rate at which they’re being implemented across the globe is increasing.
F&B companies are in many ways at the center of the sustainability challenge, as ingredients can often negatively impact the environment from which they are sourced, and the long-term impact of packaging is a constant source of concern. In addition, sustainability and ESG data and documentation up and down the value chain is often difficult to obtain, track, and manage due to the many disparate and siloed systems used today
Veeva's Approach
Veeva can help bring order to many critical areas related to sustainability and ESG. With several applications to serve the product journey, all built on a unified platform, Veeva can bring sustainability and ESG-related data and documents together to serve the needs of the diverse teams working on sustain-ability priorities within companies.
From requesting and managing data or documentation from suppliers related to sustainable ingredients to managing dossiers and usage of third-party certifications across brands globally to managing the complex world of sustainability and claims at the product or corporate level, Veeva is a partner in helping F&B companies bring order to the often chaotic yet critically important area of sustainability and ESG.
Digital transformation is a difficult undertaking. It’s sometimes hard for F&B leaders to make the business case, which can involve large sums of money and isn’t guaranteed to succeed. One differentiator that drives fast-moving succeeders in the F&B industry is having senior leaders who are engaged in a vision for using new technologies to transform the business and move beyond traditional ways of working.
Determined, thoughtful leaders who understand the power of reimagining a business process by taking advantage of the latest cloud capabilities will drive true results. For example, from a product quality and safety perspective, companies utilizing the cloud will have instant access to compliance data and documents in real time, and critical information like food safety measures will always be up to date.
Functional leaders in these disciplines, who know the lay of the land and often have hands-on experience, should consider presenting their ideas for change to senior leadership. It’s important to have a clear vision—and supporting hypotheses—about the future and be able to articulate what needs to be done now, and why. The most successful leaders will focus on an important problem and feel confident about a partner with whom they can build a strong, long-term relationship.
Many F&B companies have made substantial progress in digital investments like optimizing manufacturing, improving communications and collaboration, digitizing processes, centralizing systems, and training and upskilling teams to work in a more productive environment. Now the industry may be nearing a critical stretch that organizations must complete to manifest the opportunities that come from those investments. And in a world of lowered barriers to entry, fast followers, and agile disruptors, the final stretch is often where the winner emerges.
But many of these hard-won advancements can be throttled or squandered if there are significant roadblocks in the three key areas of Food Safety, Quality, and Regulatory. Companies attempting to meet the demands of these disciplines with fragmented point solutions are likely to run into challenges because it’s not easy to integrate these efforts across the stack. There’s a real advantage to having a single partner and a unified system that runs alongside you for the entire race.
While it remains true that F&B organizations need transactional solutions to help run the business, they must complement these with collaborative solutions that break down internal silos. Collaboration systems also accelerate the ability to get safe products to market faster and deal with complex, modern consumer requirements.
industries.veeva.com/food-beverage