Achieving your food manufacturing goals for business growth in 2024

With inflation set to fall by 2.5% in 2024, according to RSM UK, it could be the right time to integrate a traceability system into your business. Falling inflation means a steadying of the costs of goods and services. Because of this, consumers could be prompted to spend more and more.

This is good news for your business, but how can you keep up with the potential influx of customers and sales? How can you easily keep your business in a state of growth so you can achieve your business goals?

The Stevens Traceability System can help you achieve your business goals by improving customer satisfaction, reducing product giveaways or waste, improving supply chain efficiency and more. All of which affect keeping your business in a state of growth.

A traceability system helps a business to be accountable for the history of the products on the production line. Knowing where each ingredient has come from, and what it has potentially come into contact with, means a business can communicate effectively and accurately what the customer can expect.

With traceability, this is more than a duty of care. The truth is that being able to communicate the origin of your ingredients helps to instil trust in your customers, making it more likely for them to invest, and continue investing, in your brand.

In industries where weighing is a critical part of the production process, it’s in your best interests to reduce product giveaways and waste as much as possible. You can reduce product giveaways and waste in your business by improving the accuracy of ingredient usage at the start of the production line with our paperless Traceability System.

The Stevens Traceability System enables you to reduce ingredient waste and product giveaways by improving the accuracy of ingredient usage via strict tolerance control when weighing. Set strict rules that operators must follow when weighing out ingredients, minimising ingredient waste.

You can go one step further and implement our Stock Control module, enabling you to utilise FIFO (First In First Out) or FEFO (First Expired First Out), further reducing waste stock.

Not every business wants or needs a full end-to-end traceability system. This can be for many reasons:

• You may not have the capital to invest in a system in one go
• You may want to trial a specific part of the system before jumping in and investing fully
• You may only need one or a few modules of the system that satisfies your business needs

For this reason, Stevens Traceability has created a modularised traceability system that gives manufacturers the flexibility to improve their processes in stages. In other words, you forgo the cost of investing in a full end-to-end system which may not be used to its full potential.

To combat this, our traceability system can be individually tailored to your business needs. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, we take the time to assess your business requirements and install the modules you need, saving you on cost.

With a traceability system, your business can save on cost thanks to:

• Savings on ingredient spending thanks to accurate ingredient weighing and reduced scrapped batches.
• Savings on admin costs as a result of automated processes like electronic data processing and reporting.

Improving the efficiency of the supply chain with a traceability system means you save on time. The data an electronic traceability system feeds back helps managers to identify bottlenecks, goods congestion and poor flow of goods from mismanagement.

By identifying these issues, an inefficient and mismanaged supply chain can be avoided. It helps to keep a constant, manageable flow of goods that in the long run amount to time saved rather than time wasted.

Strict tolerance control implemented in the Stevens traceability system will help your business to reduce waste and product giveaways. It does this by improving the accuracy of the ingredients used. The software is modifiable to your requirements too, enabling you to set strict rules that operators must follow when weighing out ingredients, resulting in consistent products and reduced waste.

Have an audit coming up in 2024? An electronic system makes audit compliance easy, with several quality and assurance tools with digital reporting giving you greater control in meeting standards. Digital reporting enables you to produce various reports in just seconds, including mass balance. Save time on gathering evidence for auditors to make the process smoother.

One of the most important aspects of how a traceability system can help your business is increased traceability of ingredients. Tracing your ingredients during the manufacturing process means you can identify a problem such as contamination and deal with it effectively before you reap consequences like food poisoning or allergen contamination.

The Stevens Traceability System is a premium paper-free solution for adding traceability throughout your business operations. The system hosts a library of quality assurance questions, responses and stages to be set up for execution on the production floor. You can assign any necessary questions and stages against the relevant ingredients or commodities where required. Allergen control and CCPs (Critical Control Points) can be implemented in the system, as well as FEFO/FIFO within the stock module.

In an increasingly environmentally conscious society, being seen to lack sustainable practices can be a bad look for your business and could lose you customers. Many businesses are prioritising sustainability and exploring what this looks like for them, exploring how they can reduce product waste or aiming to become paperless. Don’t get left behind!

A traceability system will help your business goals by promoting transparency and environmentally friendly business practices throughout the supply chain. One practice in particular would be the transition away from paper documents. Not only are paper documents unsustainable, but they can also be easily lost or misplaced.

By integrating the Stevens Traceability System into your business, all data will be processed and held electronically across the management system. From goods-in through to despatch, all record keeping and data is collected through electronic scanners and weighing terminals. All the data is fed back into the management suite, so you can access it easily in real-time and with little worry that it will be misplaced or lost. This comes with the added benefit of peace of mind during audits – making this process more efficient.

Without a traceability system, you could be making it difficult to achieve your business goals. The Stevens Traceability System helps your business to grow by improving operational efficiency, positive customer rapport and satisfaction, waste management, stock and supply chain efficiency, and more.

In fact, why not try our Traceability System Assessment Tool and receive a free report after we’ve assessed the ideal system for your business? The short diagnostic questionnaire takes just 5 steps, and a couple of minutes to complete. This diagnostic tool will help determine your requirements and we’ll provide you with a report on what your business needs from a traceability system, and what you might want to incorporate in the future.

Perhaps you already know the traceability system for your needs. If this is the case, we’d be happy to help and share our experiences and best practices. Visit our contact page and get in touch or use our live chat to speak to one of our experts.