Between now and 2050, the world’s population will increase from 7.2 billion today to 9.6 billion in 2050. This will require a 70% increase in food production, without additional land or natural resources to do so[Source: FAO, UN]. With finite resources, it will take innovation and use of new age technologies to meet the world’s food demand and serve the customers. This includes using new technologies.
Great companies understand the primary component of business success – ‘Customer’. The food industry has been dominated by customers – their preferences, needs, and demands. Companies are leveraging technology to meet new customer demands, ensuring that they stay ahead of their competitors.
They know that if a value proposition is built around what customers really want – and will want in the future – this will lead to business success. This industry is also governed by factors such as a vast supply chain, perishable goods, ensuring the relevant safety standards, and fierce competition.
By the use of technology, you can greatly reduce the complexity, risk, and uncertainty of food production. We know that global business operations are now availing the benefit of cloud and analytics while leveraging the right software solution for the organisation.
The combination of these new age technologies will help build a digital ecosystem that can help you meet market demand in a profitable manner and build a more competitive company.
When you implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the Azure cloud and connect it with the business analytics and insight resources available on the same platform, you can chart your path to a vast range of business advantages and beneficial changes in your food production and distribution.
Here are five CIO’s concerns from the real-life experiences of food companies and how Microsoft Dynamics 365 can solve them.
1. Accurate prediction and demand planning
By leveraging data and analytics, you can generate sales forecasts based on historical buying patterns and incorporate competitive and market intelligence. You can use these forecasts to make sure that you meet demand with the right products. Plan promotions and special marketing campaigns based on data evidence that increases their likelihood of success.
2. Quality deliverable to the customers
Quality is one of the parameters that is of paramount importance to customers or consumers and this will always be the first element that they will prefer while buying the product or service. Delivering quality service/product is a concern for CIOs as it needs to be ensured that the same consistency needs to be being maintained. Analysis of relevant data nodes and integration of the relevant touch points via a new ERP solution coupled with BI and analytics helps maintain the right quality that is delivered to the customers. This in turn greatly enhances the operational efficiency.
Additionally, by applying predictive analytics on customer behaviour and patterns, you can predict their changing preferences accurately and then tweak the production to develop the service or product that is most appealing to your customer base.
3. Market basket analysis
Social listening across the channels and media where consumers spend time provides you with the basic data for assessing changing preferences and emerging trends. You can apply business analytics to those findings to see which products and product types are becoming more popular, what flavours and textures are trending and how well your products serve your brand. Those analytical outcomes, in turn, can connect to your demand and production planning, enhancing your ability to launch new products or tweak your current offerings to satisfy demand and make consumers happy.
Market basket analysis is a new technique that companies are adopting to predict the most obvious customer behaviour and pattern of product or service selection, based on which the customer makes a purchase decision. Sentiment analysis can also be done over a period of time to improve the efficiency of cross-selling through marketing messages like offers and coupons. Sentiment analysis can also be done to monitor customer emotions on a scale over social media networks.
4. Personalisation and deeper customer connect:
The ultimate aim of many organisations deploying the right ERP solution coupled with the power of cloud, BI and analytics are to provide a personalised, customer-centric experience to every buyer. This is the ultimate aim of a CIO and to achieve this in a seamless manner is a challenge for most of the global leaders.
As this process involves analysing several data point and essential analysis of customer views like - what they like, how much they are willing to pay, what they share on social media, the reviews they make, the stories they resonate with etc. Today new age ERP solution that offers the perfect digital ecosystem has made tracking, collection, and analysis all this data, possible.
You can use the CRM capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 together with business analytics to identify and understand trends and patterns in sales, returns, and customer complaints. You can fine-tune your data findings to highlight events associated with various sales regions, distributors, or outlets. Doing so helps you spot and replace problematic batches of products and materials, work with poorly performing re-sellers, and pinpoint quality and performance issues related to your employees or production equipment. As you resolve or eliminate a range of troublesome issues, you can improve customer satisfaction and improve the performance of your business processes.
5. Customer Service:
Customer service is one such part, which is hardest to optimise. Nowadays there are multiple customer touch-points like outlets, mobile app, website, social media, review sites, etc. All of these collectively impact the customer experience and his level of satisfaction. CIOs want to leverage this data collected from various outlets to arrive at meaningful insights, as this will serve as a game changer in surviving the competition.
Conclusion:
The world now is gearing towards a customer-centric approach where consumer-led strategies are driven by the wants of the customer. These are generated by being able to rightly leverage the data on consumer insights, integrate the operations via the use of the right solution and then developing the right product/solution that meets the needs of the consumers.
Technology is thus the enabler that helps CIOs drive the business toward serving the customer. CIOs are investing hugely in developing a technology roadmap that is centred towards digital ecosystem and this they are doing by reserving a majority of the portion of their IT spend for ERP, cloud, analytics, BI, and IoT.
Put Columbus food industry and ERP experts to work for you
Ready to take the next step? Columbus has the food industry and technical experience to help you gain the full benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and business analytics on the Azure cloud.
We know how to deploy solutions on-premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments to enable the outcomes you aim for. Our process optimisation and systems integration expertise help you produce greater returns from your existing technologies and practices.
Columbus food industry clients include leading enterprises that embark on global transformation initiatives as well as growing organisations that look for greater efficiency or want to boost their business viability.
To see how we helped companies like yours, check out our case study below. We partnered with Weetabix Food Company, helping them unite their complex web of third-party business solutions and boost efficiency.
