NetSuite Industries: Food and Beverage

Eliminating Manual Processes in
the Fast-Paced F&B Industry

The Food and Beverage (F&B) market is a fast-paced industry that needs to constantly adapt to consumer trends, safety requirements and regulations, tight time frames and seasonal spurts. Successfully managing your inventory is essential to reducing waste, overhead spending and keeping customers happy.

In today’s environment, F&B companies can’t afford to do things manually. Shelf life is short and pricing and availability can change rapidly, making inventory management challenging. By automating manual processes in the warehouse and manufacturing shop floor with a Netsuite Advanced Manufacturing mobile solution, you can ensure everyone always has up-to-date information to make business critical decisions.

F&B

Why Mobile Technology is Critical

Allergens, contamination concerns, spoilage! Food safety requirements are not something to play around with. Lot traceability, batch and NetSuite serialized inventory tracking are essential to tracing ingredients throughout the supply chain. Keeping record of expiration dates and using FEFO logic can streamline product movement and help reduce waste.

By automating manual processes, you eliminate error-prone manual data entry and the extra logistics between every task that are inherent in paper-driven processes. Your users are able to complete tasks in a fraction of the time. Depending on your shelf life, this time savings can greatly affect your bottom line.

You should be automating:

NetSuite Work Orders, Purchase Orders, Transfer Orders, Sales Orders – basically, all orders
Receiving
Picking
Inbound putaways
Stock counting
License Plating

Think Beyond Barcoding

To effectively manage your processes, you will want to leverage advanced mobile tools to further automate your operations:

Automated Pick Planner

One way to reduce the time spent on administration and paperwork while gaining faster pick times for orders is by planning picking tasks. With tools like RF-SMART’s Pick Planner, you can do this directly in NetSuite for multiple order types (criteria like Tote picking or wave picking). Then, send the tasks to a mobile device instantly to guide your workers on the most efficient route through the warehouse.

Work Order Reporting

You want your shop floor workers working quickly and accurately. Work Order Reporting helps your workers easily report labor and quantities using an intuitive touch screen interface or scanning straight from the shop floor.

Easy Automation to Machines

Many F&B companies are investing in machines like picking carousels or conveyors, or need to grab data from machines that record key data about your products (i.e. temperature or weight). Trying to get that data into NetSuite can be cumbersome at best. RF-SMART Automation uses our proven Built for NetSuite integration to communicate and update NetSuite in real-time with material movement and inventory changes.

Feel Good Foods

“Warehouse workers were able to utilize their handheld scanners at each step of the picking process,
where the audio and visual feedback from the handheld reduced picking errors by 25% in the first 12 months.”

Challenges

Feel Good Foods, a leading distributor of alternative, artisan food and beverage brands in southeast Australia, faced significant operational challenges before RF-SMART. The company struggled with picking errors due to similar-looking products and unclear labeling, which led to credits, returns, and a decline in customer satisfaction. Additionally, their multi-step manual picking and packing process with numerous handoffs between workers created inefficiencies, while high daily pick volumes resulted in inventory inaccuracies that disrupted their supply chain.

Solution

To address these challenges, Feel Good Foods partnered with RF-SMART to implement a comprehensive warehouse management solution. RF-SMART's Advanced Distribution WMS with barcode scanning provided audio and visual feedback to warehouse workers, significantly reducing picking errors. Automated barcode generation with embedded customer information eliminated manual data entry and streamlined operations, while the RF-SMART Inventory Reporting Tool (IRT) delivered real-time visibility of stock levels and product locations.

Results

With RF-SMART, Feel Good Foods:

Reduced picking errors by 25% within first 12 months

Increased product packing speed

Improved inventory accuracy

Reduced credits and returns

Better positioned for scalable growth

Enhanced customer satisfaction

NetSuite Industries: Food & Beverage
Streamlining Inventory Management with Automation

Eliminating Manual Processes in
the Fast-Paced F&B Industry