Consumer Packaged Goods Industry
Industry Issues
Consumer Demand for New Products
Consumers demand new and different products to fit their continually evolving lifestyles, from organic and low sodium ingredients to “greener” more environmentally friendly additives. Consequently, your plants produce many different products, each with its own recipe and production processes. Reducing time to market demands managing all these variations and being able to respond to quickly changing trends. Are you flexible and agile enough to respond?
Customer Satisfaction
One slip in the quality of the final product can have a drastic impact on sales and brand loyalty. Managing ingredients and executing each recipe with consistently-high standards is necessary for maintaining not only compliance, but, more importantly, customer satisfaction. Are ingredients transferred effectively from storage; are they added in the correct sequence, with quantities appropriate for the current recipe? Then there’s the batch mixing area; is this suitable for maintaining the quality mixture you are striving for?
Competition in the Market Place
With increased competition and narrow margins, you are placed under greater pressure to do more with less. Every small piece of efficiency you can gain on the production line is worth pursuing. Is throughput maximized by the high availability of assets? Can your assets work harder for you in order to improve your batch cycle time and get more products to market? And if your waste levels could be reduced just how much would operating performance improve?
Supply Chain Integration
Many things exert influence on supply chains. For instance, how the super retailers dictate how they want products made, packaged and delivered. Also, there’s far more emphasis placed on responsible manufacturing, sustainability and reductions in carbon footprints. Retailer “scorecards” influence your production as much as availability of raw materials. Is over capacity becoming an issue; are your competitors shifting production to smaller, more regional “mini” plants? Is your supply chain as lean and as responsive as it needs to be to compete?
Sustainability
Sustainability appears to be here to stay, impacting nearly every industry and creating opportunities and obstacles for management and production staff alike. More and more producers are responding to the consumers’ need to be more socially responsible when manufacturing their products, whether that’s recycling, lowering carbon emissions, using organic raw material or reducing water usage.. Everyone is striving for additional competitive advantages, and yet no one wants to get left behind. How are you responding?
Product Safety and Security
Maintaining production while effectively and adequately securing your manufacturing and production environments while complying with regulatory demands is a complex reality. Threats to your production and ultimately your brand come in not only physical forms, but also remotely via cyberspace. Years of effectively building consumer loyalty can be wiped out literally overnight should breaches occur that affect product quality or safety. Are you prepared? Are your systems secure? Do you know who is changing what and when?