The Top 5 Tech Mistakes Food Manufacturers Make and How to Avoid Them

In the dynamic world of food production, innovation is a requirement. To stay ahead, modern food manufacturers rely on a wide array of digital tools and solutions. While introducing new technologies can bring significant advantages, they can also create ample opportunities for costly mistakes. We'll look at five frequent mistakes food manufacturers make when adopting new systems, and how to avoid them.

1. Staying on Outdated Systems Too Long

The mentality of "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" is a costly trap for those in the food & beverage industry. While your legacy systems (like an outdated ERP) might seem to be "getting by," this mindset ignores two critical risks. First, Scalability: If your business successfully grows—adding new staff or running new shifts due to increased demand—you may discover too late that your current tech solutions are completely unscalable, causing operational gridlock, manual workarounds, and costly mistakes. Second, Support: Software manufacturers routinely announce "sunset" dates, after which support, security patches, and crucial updates are no longer guaranteed. To mitigate these risks, many modern food manufacturers are migrating from on-premises hosting to cloud-based ERP solutions, which offer guaranteed, continuous updates and eliminate the need to host and maintain hardware on on-prem servers.

2. Too Many External Systems

Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to tech solutions for manufacturers. The processes you choose to implement should be intuitive, easily understandable, and centralized. It is all too common to discover that business-critical operations, such as production scheduling, purchasing, or inventory, are being performed in a complex Excel sheet with sprawling, convoluted formulas. This causes problems, especially when this data requires so much manual data copying or keying. It is imperative that employees perform their day-to-day operations in the ERP when possible, to avoid losing access to critical information. Finally, a key advantage of implementing new tech is eliminating process redundancies. Goodbye paper, manual data entry and multiple source of truth! When users are up and running in the ERP system, data that used to be collected and archived on written reports can now be safely stored in the cloud, significantly reducing the number of papers floating around your operations floor.

3. Poor Supply Chain Visibility

As a food manufacturer, you understand that having full visibility over your supply chain is imperative. You need to know what ingredients went into which lots of product at what times so you can be prepared in the event of a recall or audit. If your business is relying on outdated tech solutions, achieving this level of traceability could prove difficult or even impossible. When operations are solely paper-based (capable of being lost or hard to read), or if you are only determining which lots of raw materials were consumed after the point of production, you lose a definitive "source of truth." This makes it impossible to reliably confirm what truly happened during the manufacturing process. Modern ERP solutions solve this challenge by making it easy to trace your production process from end-to-end: from the initial purchasing of raw materials all the way through to the production and sale of finished product, and every critical step in between.

4. Using Too Many ERP Integrations

Customization can be seen as the ultimate monkey's paw of your tech solutions. While tailoring your ERP or other software can provide valuable and unique functionality, it is crucial to understand that this comes with risk and cost (tech debt). Having too many customizations can lead to a slower system overall. Additionally, each customization added to your solution becomes a potential point of failure when your system undergoes a mandatory update. This means every update risks breaking a key piece of your custom functionality. Even though the rewards of highly specific customizations are appealing, it is important to thoroughly consider all of the potential long-term consequences before committing to that path.

5. Not Investing in Infrastructure

An often-overlooked area of investment that plays a direct role in the success of your tech solutions is your tech infrastructure. If you are working on a major project like an ERP implementation, it is important to identify and plan to resolve any infrastructure issues as early as possible. A common mistake is recognizing infrastructure needs—such as purchasing new printers and scanning devices— right before the go-live date, which severely jeopardizes the entire project's success. Another critical area to consider is Wi-Fi coverage and speed. If your solution relies on scanning devices, you need to make sure that coverage is reliable throughout the manufacturing floor, the receiving area, and any other location where employees will be using them. Having a comprehensive understanding of your current infrastructure and what is required to successfully implement your new solution is imperative.

Implementing effective tech solutions is certainly not an easy task for any food manufacturer. To achieve success, you must allow adequate time to properly research, implement, and maintain your new systems. The alternative, however, is significantly more costly. Businesses that lag behind competitors because of outdated or ineffective technology management, or experience disruptions such as malware attacks on on-premises systems, risk losing their competitive advantage. Recovering from such setbacks in the rapidly evolving technology landscape can be exceptionally challenging and expensive. While every technology journey involves inevitable minor errors, by keeping these five common pitfalls in mind, your organization can proactively avoid the major mistakes that otherwise could’ve sidelined you!

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