How to Be the Contract Manufacturer Brands Want to Work With

Contract manufacturing in the food and beverage industry continues its meteoric rise. While the model initially surged in popularity when businesses needed to respond to the increase in retail demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains on an upward trajectory—a recent report projected the market’s valuation to hit $141.6 billion by the end of this year and an impressive $207.8 billion by 2026.

This indicates that there are tremendous opportunities for contract manufacturers in terms of growth and revenue generation, but that in turn will push the level of competition in the space even higher. Thus, you should seek out ways that your contract manufacturing company can get the edge on others in the space and differentiate with smarter operations and superior results.

So, how can your organization break away from the pack, attract clients and land big contracts? Engaging in digital transformation and leveraging purpose-built technology is the key. If you want to be the contract manufacturer that brands want to work with, you should look for an industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution like Aptean Food & Beverage ERP.

To give you a more complete understanding of the benefits our software offers for businesses like yours and why it’s so important to implement the right system today, let’s dive deeper. Read on to learn how your company can capitalize on the red-hot contract manufacturing market.

Maximize Production Efficiency

As your organization brings on more customers, you must ensure that production remains high so that you can meet targets and fulfill orders on time and in full. That requires efficient processes, as well as proactive planning and organized operations—which is most effectively accomplished with tools designed to facilitate those goals.

The production planning features of Aptean Food & Beverage ERP fit the bill, giving you the insights you need to balance raw material requirements with production orders so that your supplies are always aligned with demand. The same toolset can also deploy alerts when changes to the plan would upset the balance so that you can stay on track in the fast-paced environment of a factory.

Further functionalities allow you to compare existing sales order lines to available inventory and factor in item reservations and production runs that are already on the schedule. You can also easily generate a production order to satisfy additional requirements, and intuitive filter options let you quickly identify which items require manufacturing activity.

Ramp Up Quickly on New Orders

Just as your contract manufacturing business must respond to fluctuations in demand, so too do your clients, and that means you’ll likely need to accommodate changes in order volume as well as extra unanticipated production runs. As such, you need to maximize the flexibility of your operations and find ways to get more out of your resources when necessary.

Aptean Food & Beverage ERP’s production scheduling features can help you do just that, providing visibility into work and machine center capacities to keep slack times to a minimum and get started on production of orders as soon as possible. That, in turn, will lead to higher customer satisfaction and a better working relationship with your partners.

Our application’s utility stretches further by also allowing for automatic production order generation based on the pre-determined attributes that you set. The intuitive dashboards of our software also let you quickly identify periods of downtime, sequence orders according to your needs, view product component availability and even split production orders if required.

Remain Consistent with Formulas and Quality

As a contract manufacturer, one of the most vital criteria by which you’ll be judged is the quality and consistency of the items you create, and that entails strict adherence to your clients’ recipes to replicate what they would otherwise be making in-house. Thankfully, Aptean Food & Beverage ERP has the features you need to match formulas with precision and deliver excellent end products.

The product specifications tools of our solution help you manage and track all the key elements of the goods you produce—including ingredients, allergens and nutritional values—and then link those to your bills of materials to be checked against defined inspection values. This helps to prevent errors and saves your employees valuable time.

What’s more, Aptean Food & Beverage ERP’s inspection status functionalities allow you to check products before they’re shipped to customers and create alerts when specific quality standards aren’t met. Meanwhile, the non-conformance application of our software lets you record customer complaints when specifications aren’t met and respond quickly to rectify the issue.

Maintain End-to-End Traceability of Products

Having many clients across a wide variety of sub-verticals is often the reality for contract manufacturing organizations, but that doesn’t mean your warehouse or shop floor has to be a chaotic and complicated mess of disparate materials and processes. The right software can help you make sense of the noise and maintain the rigorous bidirectional traceability that today’s food and beverage industry requires.

Aptean Food & Beverage ERP lets you leverage inbound and outbound inventory tracking tools using license plates or serial shipping container codes (SSCCs) to monitor and record the movement of pallets and cartons as they move through your facilities. The features also allow for use of handheld scanners to track products down to the individual item level.

Meanwhile, our lot management tools can generate lot numbers according to a number of elements, helping you capture important data like country of origin, production date, grower information and certificate numbers. Additionally, our functionalities for the creation of sublots ensure that you can split a larger batch into smaller increments while maintaining full traceability.

What Makes Aptean the Ideal Software Provider and Long-Term Partner

If you need additional reasons to choose Aptean’s leading food and beverage ERP for implementation in your contract manufacturing facilities, there is no shortage. For starters, there’s our decades of collective industry expertise, which has afforded our dedicated professionals an in-depth understanding of the challenges businesses like yours face and the best practices to overcome them.

We also offer and encourage flexible cloud deployments on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model for full scalability as your company grows and minimum downtime required for updates, as they’re pushed remotely. These implementations also provide better protection for your data, consistent monitoring to keep your system healthy and easier integrations with other applications.

Finally, consider that choosing Aptean Food & Beverage ERP will increase your contract manufacturing organization’s appeal to clients with greater supply chain visibility, assurance of adherence to formulations and conformance to standards. As the winner of Frost and Sullivan’s 2022 Product Leadership Award in North American ERP Software for the Food and Beverage Industry, our solution is proven to deliver the best quality, reliability and performance.

Now, if you’re ready to learn more about Aptean Food & Beverage ERP and make your contract manufacturing business the kind of company top brands want to work with, reach out to us today. You can also request a personalized demo at your convenience.