PPCP challenges in the food industry and its solutions

That the food and beverage industry is expanding is not new. Its revenue grew 12.8% and 16.9% in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The good numbers of the sector in 2021 represented 10.6% of national GDP, being R $ 766.3 billion from the food industry. The number of jobs has also increased in recent years. Only in 2021, 21,000 new jobs were opened to meet the growth of demand (Fontes Abia - Brazilian Association of Food Industry). This increase is also accompanied by increasingly fierce competition and the need for diversification of products to meet food restrictions and more demanding palates.

But not everything is flowers in this scenario. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it changes in the extreme scenario that required, even from the most planned and visionary companies, a rapid action in the face of adversity. The expansion of the diffusion and fraction of demand, the reduction of portfolio and the visibility of demand were just some of the impacts suffered by industries in various sectors, including the food industry. Add this to product diversification, taking into account flavors, formats and food restrictions (which considerably increase setup times), storage problems and costs, and unless your industry has a good programming process and manufacturing planning, chaos will be unsaturated.

The main challenges of the food industry were emerged by the pandemic situation. The variability in the supply chain, from supply to demand, has managed inventories to become even more critical in order to avoid spare and rupture, just as production management should be even more responsive to meet unexpected changes in a timely manner. Shelf life, storage restrictions for volatile inventories, as well as the problems of Setup and Balancing fruits of the increase in modern market skuss are just some of the challenges of this industry in the level of production planning and programming.

The positive side of all this? All of these problems are solutionable! With the tools and the correct advice it is possible to reduce inventory in a healthy and agile manner, increase productivity with the grouping of similar production orders, reduce ruptures from their early identification and gain agility exponentially. Not to mention the reduction of setup times, which are traditionally time consuming and complex in this sector.

Production planning and programming software such as Siemens Opcenter APS are able to assist even more complex food industries to overcome these challenges. We have already told how Dauper has revolutionized its results using Opcenter APS and the advice of Neo. It is worth checking and finding out how one month's planning has been done in just 10 minutes. As Dauper has transformed and generated results with the preactor.

Want to know more about Neo's performance with the food industry? Access our exclusive page.