Business Intelligence in Food and Beverage industry is one of the hot topics in the following years. And no wonder!

If you find a suitable match for your company, you can improve outdated processes, forecast products in demand and know when your customers’ behaviour has changed.

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the procedural and technical infrastructure that collects, stores, and analyses the data produced by a company’s activities.

In our recent research with more than 50 Food and Beverage companies, we have identified that 78% are either already looking for automation opportunities or considering them next year.

Meaning, the FCMG industry is going to heavily focus on finding better and more cost-saving solutions to use their existing resources.

Here are a few ideas on how to utilise Business Intelligence in Food and Beverage Industry in 2023:

1. Forecast products in demand
2. Develop Energy Management
3. Improve Employee Retention

Forecast Products in Demand.

Understanding your customers is key to sustainable growth. With the latest automation, you can not only improve your tedious tasks but also receive analytics connected to your products, supply change and consumers.

One of the Business Intelligence in the Food industry examples is getting access to the latest data insights to produce only items in demand for your customers. Statistics show due to the current economic conditions, consumers are shopping differently by embracing a selective mindset. 

To deal with such challenges, companies in the Food and Beverage industry in 2023 should improve their business operations by gathering information and collecting actionable insights.

This approach will help you to waste less time and money on providing unique experiences, especially when consumers might not be interested in them.

With the latest product-in-demand insights, your company can improve product development and innovation by receiving data regarding your customers’ interests.

For example, with the Declining Account feature built by Allsop, you will track customers that are no longer purchasing as much this week as they have on average over the past 13 weeks.

The feature not only shows when someone is ready to leave your company but also highlights what type of product your customer is purchasing less or what item they replaced.

This small Business Intelligence (BI) tool will empower your Customer Service team to contact those clients and clarify the reasoning for the changed behaviour.

By having a direct call with your customer, you can clarify these changes, and we can ensure you will find something new about your customer and the whole industry itself. 

Develop Energy Management.

Establishing Energy Reduction Management is not an easy task. Many Food and Beverage companies are considering this sustainability change in 2023.

However, it comes with a lot of questions: “How to approach it correctly?”, “Is it too expensive for the business?”, “And is there a real efficiency in it?”.

Knowing these concerns, we found these examples from Food and Beverage industry for you!

Let’s check one of our clients’ approaches to Energy Management.

Dawn Meats reduced approximately 59,000 tonnes of CO2e in 2020 by improving their energy and water management and transitioning to 100% renewable wind energy for their electricity requirements across the UK and Ireland.

Over the last two years, these changes allowed the business to save enough energy to power 20,215 homes per year.

They rolled out their Energy Reduction programme in 2019 and achieved such a positive outcome by improving Business Intelligence utility measuring and reporting, upskilling key employees and instilling a culture of accountability in each department.

In 2020 they installed modern electrical and fuel meters, including an online BI management system for real-time analysis of utility usage. Other capital projects included refrigeration systems, effluent plant upgrades, and the installation of more efficient hot water generation systems.

Currently, the food manufacturer continues with their Energy Reduction Programme and set a target to achieve a 40% energy reduction by 2025.

Another example comes from Candy Plus at Valeo Group.

Candy Plus shares its commitment to energy reduction and is now continuously reviewing and implementing energy-saving opportunities.

At their largest site, the company implemented several energy efficiency projects, which have delivered a total annual energy intensity reduction of 10.5% in the last 4 years.

Since 2018, Candy Plus has reduced its electrical intensity by 8.2% and achieved it through a lighting redesign, LED upgrade and replacing their chilled water system.

The company noted that by implementing these energy savings opportunities, they have realised a significant energy reduction, increased their resilience and reduced their carbon footprint as a business.

Improve Employee Retention.

Whilst we mentioned a need for automation in your processes, it is essential to do so only when your teams are equipped with modern technologies.

Although it is easy to blame low employee retention on software tools, it’s likely your employees store all customers’ data in spreadsheets, have poor visibility of orders and lack an analytics dashboard to make data-driven decisions.

We found out 74% of FMCG companies receive orders by phone & email. They manually process incoming requests, key in 50 to 100 lines in each order form, and spend most of their week completing tedious tasks.

During the research, Food and Beverage companies mentioned various issues with collecting orders by phone or email. For example, the main problem they highlighted was data mistakes.

Due to a low employee retention rate in the Customer Service industry, many employees either do not have enough experience or have never been through training to correctly input information onto the platform. Therefore, they process orders with errors.

On the other hand, due to a high volume of work, Operation Specialists key with data mistakes, which leads to customers receiving incorrect products or a wrong number of goods.

Now, we also had a chat with those who have automation.

With a third of businesses processing orders manually, it leaves only 26% of companies to have a platform to manage customers’ orders.

This automation helps companies to have a higher employee retention rate, improving their customer service and giving them an advantage in the market.

“We have a customer portal, and we couldn’t imagine our working life without it!

Customers place orders that are automatically filled and updated accordingly in our system. It takes almost no time for the platform to fill the form when our orders have between 50 to 100 lines!

Our team now deals only with exceptions or orders coming via phone. It allows us to reengage salespeople in other aspects of the business and allows them to take part in high-value tasks.” – Sales Coordinator

Conclusion.

If you want to make 2023 less stressful for your team, consider implementing Business Intelligence in departments that require data-driven decisions. 

At Allsop we know how daunting it might be to implement new technology, hence we provide a free-of-charge processes audit.

From this exercise, you will receive:

✓ Full overview of your processes

✓ Identified areas of improvement

✓ Possible ROI after automating tedious tasks

Sounds good? Book today ? FREE of cost call.