food manufacturing software

6 Manufacturing and Food Safety Software Must-Haves

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6 Manufacturing and Food Safety Software Must-Haves

Now more than ever food and beverage manufacturers are up against greater challenges. Antiquated pen-and-paper tracking is still surprisingly prevalent in even large and mid-size companies. These systems can open the door to issues when it comes to quality and food safety requirements. 

Alternatively, the right food safety software can help balance business profitability and FDA regulatory compliance guidelines. These are six key points to consider when looking at food and beverage manufacturing software.

1. Traceability Software for Food Manufacturing

The most essential assurance that your final product is safe and salable is being able to accurately track qualified ingredients and products through every stage of the manufacturing process. Being able to track individual lots, bins, and ingredients ensures that your manufacturing and quality teams can be proactive in identifying and addressing issues at any point in the production cycle. 

That said, sometimes problems arise. Good traceability software for food manufacturing will tremendously speed up the process in the event of a recall or inspection. The integration of traceability software and your FDA regulatory compliance and food safety software will provide a record of where your components came from and what products they went into.

2. Quality Management

Quality is arguably the biggest part of the manufacturing process. After all, this is the product you’re selling. You can increase profitability and minimize the risk of recalls with an integrated quality management or ERP system as part of your business flow. With an integrated quality system you can hold an upper hand against the competition, rather than being reactive. 

Food safety and FDA regulatory compliance software isn’t just about following the rules. The right ERP platform will ensure your production meets your defined standards — consequently increasing profitability!

3. Inventory Maintenance and Planning

Especially when dealing with perishable goods, managing your inventory is key to maximizing production capacity. Your food and beverage manufacturing software should be able to help you manage “use by” dates and orchestrate your materials management planning and procurement. 

Detailed work-in-process coordination and ingredient requirement anticipation are essential to maximizing your production cycles, labor demands, and ultimate profitability.

4. Food Safety Plans and CAPA’s

Whatever product you’re manufacturing is going to have some unique production process. Your food safety software should help you manage the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), process controls, and analysis of the goods you are producing. 

In the event of an audit or recall, you may have to create Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) plans. Managing quality and safety manually can leave you with the grueling process of trudging through binder after binder for relevant information. 

Conversely, an integrated food safety software system with FDA regulatory compliance in mind makes your quality management team precise and efficient in the generation of CAPA’s and food safety plans.

5. Batch Recipes and Ingredient Details  

A food and beverage manufacturing software package should be able to track all relevant information about the ingredients in your final product. Your system needs to track things like technical properties, lab results, costing information, allergens, product claims, and history. 

Furthermore, documentation at every step ensures your product is exactly what you claim it is on the label.

6. The Right Solution at the Right Time

The decision to move forward with a software solution is not a decision to be taken lightly. Finding the one that suits your business size and the industry niche is critical. You’re trying to make your manufacturing process smoother and grow your business. 

Full-scale Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software can be a costly and complex solution. Fortunately, there are plenty of excellent and capable software solutions.  

Crystal System’s Clarity Plugins provide an advanced ERP System for Natural Products that extends the capabilities of popular software like QuickBooks to help you streamline your manufacturing process without having to invest in a costly and complex ERP System.

Contact us today so we can find the best solution for your organization.

QuickBooks Manufacturing

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QuickBooks Manufacturing

Use Acctivate to create food products, nutraceutical products, or products of any kind.

The solution is Acctivate for Quickbooks with Clarity.

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Acctivate lets you create Bills Of Material, check the availability of components, and issue Purchase Orders for supply.  Create kits such as holiday baskets and configure-to-order combinations. Build counter displays, samples and testers as the need arises.

Crystal Systems extends Acctivate with formula and recipe calculations, quality documentation and a best-practice configuration for raw material processors as well as food, supplement, cosmetic and personal care manufacturers.

Manufacturing

Combine Acctivate with Clarity plugins to complete your QuickBooks manufacturing process solution.

By-Product Traceability

Production orders let you assign waste products and lot traceability for your by-products. The system includes the cost of your by-products in production costing reports.

Configurable Production Instructions

Create many different product types such as capsules, processed foods, produce, meat, fish, ingredients, liquid and powders. Each job type is processed in a unique way that lends itself to your type of manufacturing.

Contract Manufacturing

Configure your Bill Of Materials to support process charges and inventory management for Contract Manufacturing.

Equipment And Labor Scheduling

Assign equipment and labor to batch jobs. Link a series of assembly stages into a single manufacturing process. Prioritize the scheduling and execution of specific work orders.

Flexible Pick Lists

Produce inventory pick lists that work with your team and existing production processes. Design pick lists to meet your needs with Crystal Reports. Add photos, material handling requirements, barcode images and more to make pick lists a natural part of your production process.

Lot Tracking

You won’t miss an important transaction during your next audit or compliance inspection. QuickBooks with Acctivate provides complete lot number tracking – from raw materials through finished goods.

Light assembly and kitting lets you pack products into different sizes of containers and generate lot codes through that process.

Produce reports for a single inventory item from the originating vendor to all end-user customers – all the way through the manufacturing and/or distribution process. See what lots and quantities were shipped to customers for a date range.

Material Requirements Plan

Compute your Material Requirements Plan (MRP) by comparing on-hand inventory to purchase orders, production schedule, backorders and customer orders. Besides creating insight into the workload for work center and machine centers, the Business Alerts provide insight into the plans for critical materials.

Multi-Step Production

With multi-step assembly orders, you can create complex formulas that model the same way you produce your products in the real world. At each stage of production, Acctivate will let you create new inventory, use inventory created in other runs, and produce whatever finished goods you need.

Plant Scheduling

Crystal Reports lets you create a complete picture of all ongoing production orders. You can use filters to select on a particular location or a specific date. From a simple overview of the plan, to detailed process reporting, you configure exactly what you need to organize your operation.

Quality Sampling

Tracks samples from Product Development Requests through batch production.

Rework Production

Need to make corrections to a production run? No problem. Revise the assembly sequence with necessary adjustments using the reworked production. Maintains full records of what happened. You’ll always know exactly what suppliers gave you which ingredients, which lots they went into and which customers received them.

Ingredient Weighing

Create manufacturing pick and weigh instructions with lot and location information.  Automatically manage allergen sensitivity requirements. Connect your scales to weigh and record the consumption of items more quickly and more accurately.

Workorders

A work order-driven production module makes it easy to customize your production flow to meet your needs. From consistent, daily production-to-production needs that are driven by your daily customer orders, QuickBooks with Acctivate takes care of your food processing operations.

Yield Management

Because the final yield of each production run is a big factor in the true cost of your products, Acctivate tracks the final yield (and any scrapped amounts) of each run and automatically factors it into all cost calculations. You can also apply activity-based labor costs to each recipe.

Some of the features on this page are provided by Crystal Clarity, which is a set of software plugins that enhance Acctivate.

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